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 After McDaniel's Oscar win, producers all over Hollywood clamored for her services, and during the next decade she appeared in more than 20 movies, including The Great Lie (1941), In This Our Life (1942), Since You Went Away (1944), Song of the South (1946), and Family Honeymoon (1948). At the height of her success, she had earned enough money to buy a 30 room mansion in an affluent Los Angeles neighborhood known as Sugar Hill, into which she moved with her third husband, James Lloyd Crawford. A superstitious McDaniel,
however, worried that she had become too successful. She was a woman of deep
religious faith who would often say of her good fortune, "I did my best,
and God did the rest." Her biographer Carlton Jackson wrote that her
accomplishments seemed to give her a sense of guilt, "as though she
constantly asked in reference to success,'Why me?'"In 1944, while filming Janie
for Warner Bros., a 49-year-old McDaniel announced to a stunned Hollywood that
she was "taking time out to welcome the stork!" She had always wanted
to have a baby, and in preparation, she canceled a planned publicity tour to
South America, turned down several lucrative movie offers, and settled in to
await the birth of her child. But it was not to be. She had, it turned out,
suffered a false pregnancy, misdiagnosed, her doctors claimed, because of her
large size. She refused to see anyone for weeks, and for a time seemed to lose
all interest in living. She eventually returned to her career but would be
plagued by depression for the rest of her life. Making matters worse, her
marriage to Crawford soon dissolved, and a longsimmering feud with the NAACP
president Walter White erupted, threatening to destroy everything she had
worked for. The NAACP had been at war with Hollywood almost since the
organization's inception, in 1909. It had protested D.W.Griffith's 1915 Birth
of a Nation for its racist stereotypes, and had since then continually
pressured the major studios to put more positive black images on the screen.
But its harshest criticism was reserved for the black actors and actresses who
played roles the organization considered demeaning, and its most frequent
target was Hattie McDaniel. In the mid 1930s White began assailing her
"grinning, darky stereotypes." She was stunned by the accusations.
She couldn't understand how the same comic antics that had led to her earlier
success were now seen as shameful. She considered White a spiteful, meddling
hypocrite and called him a "one-eighth Negro" who resented
dark-skinned blacks. (White was very light-skinned and frequently
"passed" in order to infiltrate white organizations.) On the subject
of her work, McDaniel said she'd rather make "$700 a week playing a maid
than $7 a week being a maid!" She had always been concerned with
Hollywood's screen images of blacks and had frequently protested various scenes
and lines in the scripts she was given. That she often got the changes she
requested was a tribute as much to the esteem directors had for her work as to
the forcefulness of her personality. White, however, was relentless.
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