MY DINNER TO REMEMBER WITH SIDNEY POITIER
Yes, he came to dinner. In the summer of 2014, I received word through a friend that I was being asked to a dinner in Los Angeles that would include Sidney Poitier. I’m not easily star-struck. As you can imagine, in my line of work, you meet all types. But Poitier wasn’t just a star, he was a legend, a lion, an almost mythical figure in black culture and the culture at large. He was black royalty.
He was more than just the first African American to win an Academy Award for best actor, for his performance in the 1963 film Lilies of the Field. According to Aram Goudsouzian’s book, Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon, before one civil rights march in Mississippi in the 1960s, singer Sammy Davis Jr, “who avoided the Deep South, swallowed his fear and flew to Jackson.”
On the appointed date and place — Spago in Beverly Hills, California — Poitier was indeed there with his wife and two of their friends.
As I approached the table, Poitier greeted me with a blinding smile, the kind that beacons and beguiles, the kind that makes you feel that you have known a complete stranger your whole life.
Poitier was the centre of gravity in that room. From beginning to end that evening, Poitier whispered slick, salty jokes to me with the devilish satisfaction of a schoolboy. He was 87 at the time.
He was overwhelmingly charming but also self-effacing and unassuming. I now knew, at close range, what star power was.
The server who took our order was familiar to Poitier, so he had greeted her warmly. Poitier said that I simply had to try his favourite dessert on the menu. The server said that sadly they were out of it, but passing her back the menu, Poitier said, “But I really want it.”
He wasn’t angry or even insistent. His glee never left him. He said the words, delivered the line, more as an unfortunate fact than an admonition.
Later, the server returned to the table excitedly to say that they had “found” more of the dessert and slid it in front of us. “Found it,” I thought, “Ha!” All I could imagine was a mad scramble in a kitchen freezer or a dash to a local grocer for the ingredients to make more.
I don’t know why this exchange remains so vivid for me or exactly how I should consider it. On the one hand, you could argue that we should be as gracious as possible to restaurant workers doing a hard job, sometimes for little pay, and when they say they are out of something, that should be the end of it.
But I saw it differently, from his perspective. He had learned that sometimes, when people say something can’t happen, they simply haven’t tried hard enough. Sometimes, can’ts are soft.
When Poitier arrived in New York, he did odd jobs until, as he wrote in his memoir, he said, “What the hell,” and tried his hand at acting. That didn’t go well. As Poitier wrote, when he went in for an audition at the American Negro Theater, “the man in charge quickly let me know — and in no uncertain terms — that I was misguided in my assumptions.” He continued: “I had no training in acting. I could barely read! And to top it off, I had a thick singsong Bahamian accent.”
As Poitier recounted, the man was seething: “‘You just get out of here and stop wasting people’s time. Go get a job you can handle,’ he barked. And just as he threw me out, he ended with, ‘Get yourself a job as a dishwasher or something.’” Poitier had already worked as a dishwasher.
Undeterred, Poitier would will himself into becoming one of the greatest actors America has ever known. As he put it, “There’s something inside me — pride, ego, sense of self — that hates to fail at anything.”
For people like Poitier, who have lived a life in which, by sheer grit and determination, they turned noes into yeses, noes lack finality.
Toward the end of the evening, Poitier asked me about my family and then told me that he had six daughters and no sons. “I’m going to adopt you,” he belted with a smile. He asked me to send him and his wife a copy of my book and commanded, “Sign it ‘To Mom and Dad.’”
Maybe to someone else, this would have been just another ordinary dinner. Not me. That night lingers with me.
I could see in Poitier what a life well-lived looked like on a man, how you could grow old with grace and kindness or grow into them, and how elegance and sophistication are timeless and eternal.
He was the epitome of black dignity, black beauty, black pride and black power. Now, whenever I face a roadblock, or even my own doubts, I remember the phrase that my “dinner dad”, maybe one of America’s dads, etched in my memory: “But I really want it.”