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 During the war years, his crusade against "mammyism" reached its most fervent, with McDaniel still his primary target. While serving as a correspondent in the Far East from 1944 to 1945, White is said to have encouraged black troops stationed in the Pacific to write letters of protest against her. To McDaniel, a die-hard patriot who was active with the USO, the Hollywood Canteen, and the war-bond effort, the letters were a painful blow. By the time the war ended,
Hollywood was becoming aware that if it wanted to win the sizable black
audience, plantation films would have to go. The studios, wary of race
controversy, simply discarded scripts or eliminated black parts altogether.
Casting directors refused to hire some black stars, including McDaniel. During
the first five months of 1948, she had just two weeks of movie work. The
following year, she made her last film, The Big Wheel. Her trademark mammy
roles had all but disappeared. As her film career waned,
McDaniel turned her attention back to radio, and in 1947 she become the first
black actress to play a black character on the nationally syndicated radio
program The Beulah Show. Until then, the parts were usually played by white
men. Told they did not sound black enough, many African-American actors were
passed over for whites who had mastered the inaccurate and humil- iating
gobbledygook the scriptwriters called Negro dialect. If blacks were hired and,
in the end, refused to speak it, they were fired.McDaniel's seven-year contract
called for an incremental salary that went up to $2,000 a week, with provisions
that freed her from ever having to speak in "Negro dialect." She also
had script approval. The Beulah Show was a hit,
and its producers began to develop a version for the new medium of television.
But Mc- Daniel was not their first choice for the TV role; instead, Ethel
Waters was signed. The show began airing in late 1950. Both programs were
popular with black and white audiences, and by 1951 they ranked near the top of
the Nielsen ratings, with the radio show alone garnering an estimated 20
million listeners a night. The program took audiences into the sub- urban world
of the Hendersons, a white mother, father, and son, all managed by their
ebullient maid, Beulah. The NAACP and the Urban League hailed The Beulah Show
for its modern take on race relations. When Ethel Waters bowed out after the
first 15 weeks, citing "pressing commitments" elsewhere, McDaniel
signed on as her replacement. She completed only six episodes (they were never
aired) before ill health and exhaustion, from doing both the radio and
television shows at once, forced her to withdraw. After it became clear that
she was too ill to return, the television show's producers decided to replace
her. Louise Beavers and then Lillian Randolph played the part until the show
was canceled, in 1954. During this period,
McDaniel's life began to unravel. Always a consummate professional, she
suddenly had difficulty remembering her lines; she began to lose weight, and a
painful boil under her left arm worried her. Her fourth husband, Larry
Williams, walked out on her four months after their June 1949 wedding. After the divorce, she moved
from her mansion into a modest eight-room cottage. Despite all her success, she
had begun to feel herself a complete failure. She was alone and miserable. The
broken marriages, the battle with Walter White, and her sadness at having been
criticized by so many blacks had taken their toll. At her lowest moments, she
often remarked, "Hell can't be any worse than what I'm living through
right now." I 1949 she tried to end her life with a bottle of sleeping
pills;only the timely visit of a worried friend saved her. As her health
continued to decline, mounting medical bills ate away at her savings.
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