The stuttering performer

It was her impediment that ensured her success, writes Elizabeth McCracken

IN some ways you could trace everything back to the stutter. In 1933, Gertrude Hadley ran away from her Arkansas home with a former prizefighter named Joe Jeannette II, who’d shown up at her high school prom. First they went to Hot Springs, where they married, and then St. Louis, and finally New York City. Her father, Willis Hadley, was a teacher and wanted her to go to college in Tennessee; he threatened to come with his shotgun to confront his new sonin-law. Then he decided that his daughter had made her bed and must lie in it.

Her bed was in Harlem — “the most segregated place I knew when I came here,” Gertrude Hadley Jeannette said, years later. “On 125th Street, Woolworth’s, you couldn’t go in there and sit at the counter. Childs’ restaurant on Lenox Avenue, no black person could go in there and get served. The Loew’s Theatre, you could go there, but you had to go upstairs, the same as you did down South.” Instead, she and her husband went to the Savoy Ballroom: “The Savoy was different, because that was ours, and we let everybody know that was ours.”

Despite the Savoy, despite riding with her husband’s motorcycle club, the Harlem Dusters, she was lonely. Well, why not continue her education? She enrolled in shorthand classes in the basement of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, where the American Negro Theatre sometimes practiced. There she met Frederick O’Neal, one of the theatre’s founders. “I notice that you stammer,” she said he told her. “We’ve got good speech therapists at the American Negro Theatre.”

You couldn’t get the therapy without acting lessons. To pay for acting lessons, she needed a job. It was 1942, American men were off to war, and Jeannette — who a few years earlier had become among the first women to get a motorcycle licence in New York City — decided she might as well become a taxicab driver. She didn’t tell her husband (“he never would have allowed me to take that test”), but she was a quick learner, studied the maps given to her and passed the test. Her husband found out that she was one of the first licensed female cabdrivers by reading it in the newspaper.

AN OBVIOUS HANDICAP

A speech impediment is a private thing and a public thing. It belongs only to you, but you can’t keep it to yourself: It’s one of the first facts a stranger knows about you. Jeannette discovered that the excellent memory that helped her learn the map of New York City meant she had to read a script only once or twice to know her lines, and if she knew her lines, she wouldn’t stammer.

The American Negro Theatre required its students to audition for roles, and so she did. Every time she auditioned, she said, she got the part, and every time she stood onstage, she shook and prayed to God to get her out of it. Again and again, she made her mark, and she stood on it. She appeared in the Broadway premieres of Lost in the Stars (1949), The Amen Corner (1965) and Vieux Carré (1977).

She had become an actress not despite her stammer but because of it. “I don’t like acting,” she said in an interview years later. “That’s why I took up directing. That’s why I took up writing.”

The American Negro Theatre lasted only 11 years, but some of the great actors of the 20th century started out there: Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier.

Poitier paid for acting classes by working as a janitor and auditioned with every single verse of O Captain! My Captain! in a Bahamian accent so thick, Jeannette recalled, “you could cut it with a knife.” Belafonte and Poitier, Dee and Davis all went off to Hollywood and glory and beyond.

Jeannette, who’d already run away from home once, stayed put. In 1950 she took over a space at the Elks Building, which had housed the American Negro Theatre Playhouse, calling it the Elks Community Theatre. Thereafter she ran community theatres all over Harlem. She wrote plays and continued to act onstage and in the movies.

In 1979, she founded another company, and somebody suggested it be named the Jeannette Players. “No, this has to be a community thing,” she said. Somebody else suggested her maiden name. Again, she said no. They suggested a longer name, the Harlem Artists Development League Especially for You.

Not until the name was shortened for the letterhead did she realise: Her new troupe was called the H.A.D.L.E.Y. Players after all. Sometimes it offered more than one kind of sustenance, a play and a Sunday dinner, the meal often cooked by Jeannette herself. She won the Paul Robeson Award from Actors’ Equity and was presented with the key to the village of Harlem.

In her hack-licence photo, she wears her hat at a rakish angle and stares at the camera with a peculiar determination, a look as sharp as the knife that could cut Sidney Poitier’s accent or excise her own stutter. In later recorded interviews, her voice is beautiful, her elocution exact, no flutter of Arkansas or her stammer, except that both led her to the rest of her life.