Born in Chicago in 1920, Dempsey J. Travis became a self-made millionaire, one of the country’s most successful black entrepreneurs. He was president and CEO of Travis Realty Co., but his many interests and his intense commitment to the community took him to board positions in the Chicago Historical Society, the Museum of Broadcast Communications, the New Regal Theater Foundation, and Northwestern Memorial Hospital. He was on the governing committee of the Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and was president of the Society of Midland Authors. He authored seven books, one of which helped introduce me to jazz.
I put an excerpt of his autobiography, I Refuse to Learn to Fail, in my book Black Writing from Chicago. His book combines a nostalgic naiveté with an unflinching look at social obstacles as it swings back and forth between Travis’ absolute faith in the promise of success and the difficulty of fulfilling that promise in the face of racism. The book begins with his first hard experience of racism at age five and his mother’s tender response: she pulls out a beautiful black velvet jacket and says he is her beautiful black velvet boy. This sows in him the resolve never to fail. Much later, after experiencing such things as the brutal racism of the army, he gains his first major position as head of the Dearborn Real Estate Board. “At last,” he says, “I had gained the attention of both the white and Black press in Chicago.” Yet he soon realizes that “Prominence in the Black community and professional standing provided no immunity from discrimination by the insurance industry.” His response? Launch a multi-level campaign against red-lining.
Travis himself, who died in 2009, would have quibbled with the term “self-made.” Undergirding his autobiography is, as Harvette Grey says in her introduction, “the conviction that African American communities can be strong…that African American heritage supersedes other issues, such as class.” Chapter 5 begins: “DuSable High School nurtured many talents, including Mayor Harold Washington, Judge William Cousins, Dr. Allen Wright, Dr. Alice Blair and comic Redd Foxx, whose real name was John Elroy Sanford. Nat ‘King’ Cole was in my Spanish class.” Travis was extraordinarily proud of this heritage of success, and thus self-making was always tied to pride in, and commitment to, the Black community.
He was, however, sharply and prophetically critical of many recent trends in the Black Community. For example, here is part of his Epilogue to I Refuse to Learn to Fail that delivers a scathing, saavy critique of the failure of Black role-modeling:
“Some of the most powerful and successful of today’s African Americans were yesterday’s urchins. Their springboard from the streets to the suites came through observing or adopting as mentors, even vicariously, the Black achievers who lived next door, down the block, across the street or around the corner. Although restrictive housing covenants, rather than individual preferences, defined where African Americans could live until 1948, the mobility of successful Blacks during the past three decades has created a void in leadership for those who stay in the old neighborhoods. There are few role models left to meet urban youth on the streets of their own communities and encourage them to stay in school and study hard so that they, too, can achieve financial security through legitimate avenues. Role models in the 1990s spring not from the neighborhood, but from TV and movie screens. Young people watching In Living Color see Willie, the coke dealer, looking cool as he drives a Jeep Grand Wagoneer around the school. They identify with Baby Wimp the Pimp, who rides through the streets in his Mercedes Benz 560 SEL to monitor his girls. Who among their elders point out that the real role model on that TV show is Keenen Ivory Wayans, whose comedic talents and fiscal savvy are founded in self-discipline, determination and dedication?
“Many big-money athletes live in white suburbs or in some sections of a city where they are oddities rather than role models. The Black idols jumped ship early, taking their talents, and investment capital away from communities that needed them both. They focus their future on the suburbs in spite of overwhelming evidence that the central urban areas will be the new frontiers of the 21st century.”
√ Go to a list of Black Writers written about on this site, OR the Teaching Diversity main page.
The Five-Year Engagement: Just Believe!
It’s not his fault he’s not Jimmy Stewart, or Cary Grant, or any number of classic actors embroiled in the zany endings of any number of classic directors—Frank Capra, Billy Wilders, Preston Sturges.
Judd Apatow and his talented cadre of actors and writers—Jason Segel, Seth Rogan, Jonah Hill, Joseph Gordon-Levitt—have defined the comedy genre of our age, the Slacker Comedy, and many other actors, like Ben Stiller and Steve Carrel, are all too glad to ride one of the biggest waves in Hollywood history. The Apatow brand focuses on males. It ingeniously shows us man-boys not wanting to grow up, wanting to stay in the frat house or online or in other infantile pursuits forever, but finally, miraculously, making that leap into a kind of adulthood, as the Seth Rogan characters did in Knocked Up or Zack and Miri Make a Porno, for example. Finally, slackers usually embrace old truths about love and responsibility and the movies end up comfortable and moral and really serious about relationships.
In The Five-Year Engagement, Jason Segel takes the Apatow brand one step further by finally creating an Apatow female lead truly equal to the male lead. Furthermore, Tom and Violet aren’t slackers: they’re serious about careers. What I miss, as some others have, is the zing of the dialogue, the feisty, witty repartee between male and female leads of old that seemed to more truly signify a dynamic equality. Think Tracy-Hepburn. Or take this exchange, the first between Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake in Preston Sturges’ classic Sullivan’s Travels.
Sullivan (McCrea), pretending to be a hobo stops into a cheap diner, asking only for a cup of coffee and a donut (a “sinker”). Veronica Lake hangs in the background until she says to the counter man:
“Give him some ham and eggs.”
“That’s very kind of you, sister, but I’m not hungry. Cup of coffee and a sinker’ll fit me up fine.”
“Don’t be a sucker.” [To the counter man again:] “Give him some ham and eggs.” [To McCrea:] “Way I’m fixed 35 cents ain’t gonna make any difference.”
“Things a little tough, huh?”
“I wouldn’t be sitting in an Ol’ Wagon for local color…They locked me out of my room.”
“That’s too bad. Well, things are tough everywhere. War in Europe, strikes over here. There’s no work, there’s no food…”
“Drink your coffee while it’s still hot.”
“What’d they lock you out of your room for?”
“Did I ask you any questions?”
“Well, sorry. Been in Hollywood long?”
“Long enough.”
“Trying to crash the movies or something?”
“Something like that.”
“I guess that’s pretty hard.”
“I guess so. I never got close enough to find out.”
“Sorry.”
“Hey, who’s being sorry for who? Am I buying you the eggs or are you buying the eggs for me?”
Like that. All delivered rapid-fire, yet with droll non-chalance. In comparison, the exchanges in The Five-Year Engagement are slow, deliberate, and very serious. Emily Blunt—a good actress headed towards greatness, maybe—isn’t Hepburn or Veronica Lake yet, and anyway sharp wit flying back and forth between male and female doesn’t seem in the cards for movies these days, perhaps with signal exceptions, like in moments of Up in the Air. Wit is more the province of men, while women do earnest pleading of one kind or another.
There are so many reasons for this, but the one I want to focus on now has to do with being suckers. “Never give a sucker an even break,” W.C. Fields famously said, but this supposes that you can spot a sucker and—most important—that you’re not one yourself. But these days we all feel like suckers. Politicians make suckers out of us, certainly, but so do our marriages, and our jobs, and our educations, maybe especially our belief in happy endings. Economic downturn, environmental degradation, political gridlock…personal gridlock. How’s all this going to turn out? When you’re so unsure about happy endings, it’s hard to go all out for zany ones. It’s not just that Jason Segel isn’t Jimmy Stewart, it’s also that for all the disaster and despair Jimmy Stewart’s generation lived through, it still—on the whole—believed. That belief gave it freedom. It’s belief in men and women—including a belief that women were, or someday would surely be, equal—created enough space to take more chances on real, male-female wit than we see today.
Apatow’s brand isn’t so free. In an age of unbelief, the age of the sucker, it seems to have willingly taken on a significant burden. Anything outrageous must be redeemed by a plea. BELIEVE, the brand seems to say. At least for the moment it gives me hope that, given the way Apatow & Company command the box office, we still seem hungry for the encouragement, still fight through the cliches and root for a love like Tom and Violet’s. Is the brand making suckers out of us? Will it really all work out? In another Apatow syndicate hit movie, when Kyle (Seth Rogan) finds out Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has cancer, he says to him: “Hey, it’s not that bad. You’ve got at least a 50/50 chance.”
(2011, Dir. Nicholas Stoller, 124m, R. I say, 3 stars.)
*** See a list of other reviews.