February 7, 1988 | Sidney Poitier seems remarkably composed, even serene, for a man who has little more than an hour to catch a plane.
His limousine is threading slowly, ever so slowly, through the traffic and the late afternoon rain in the streets of San Francisco. And there’s the little matter of his airline ticket: He can’t find it, he’s misplaced it somewhere between his hotel room and the street. The Touchstone Pictures representatives have called ahead to the airport, scrambling to obtain another booking for Poitier on the Los Angeles-bound flight. Maybe they can, maybe they can’t.
And maybe the traffic and the rain will make the question moot.
You have no real stake in whether Poitier makes the flight or not, but you feel your own stomach twisting into knots. You steal a glance at the back of the neck of the driver, and you think you can see muscles tightening with telltale signs of stress.
Poitier’s right-hand man darts his gaze through the misted-over glass, then shakes his head. The expression he wears is easy for you to read: “Impossible! Just impossible!”
Sidney Poitier remains impervious to the tension. He has been asked a question, and, as usual, he is taking the time to organize his thoughts, to choose each word with a watchmaker’s meticulous care. He gives you the feeling that, right now, at this moment, there is nothing more important than meeting your gaze, and sharing a privileged moment in a private conversation. For a long time, the only sound you hear is the muffled din of the rain, the traffic, and the windshield wipers.
Poitier is considering the quote you’ve read aloud from his acclaimed autobiography, This Life. In the book, a 1980 best seller, Poitier describes his impoverished youth in the Bahamian Cat Islands, and his hard-scrabble days as a dishwasher in Manhattan. (He learned to speak English, he says, by listening to and imitating the tones of grandiloquent radio announcers.) The book is a success story, describing Poitier’s rise from off-Broadway bit player to Hollywood superstar, the first such triumph ever enjoyed by a black man in America.
But along with memories of the good times — his Oscar victory for Lilies of the Field, his memorable performances in The Defiant Ones, In the Heat of the Night and To Sir, With Love, among others — This Life also dwells on that period in the 1970s when Poitier, long an inspiring symbol of black achievement, suddenly found himself an object of contemptuous envy.
It was during the heyday of the so-called “blaxploitation” films, small-budget action dramas in which black heroes loved, fought and killed just as much as any white movie good guy ever had. Maybe even more, if only to make up for lost time.
And a lot of the new black stars felt they had a lot of time to make up for, because, for too long, the only black actor who was getting work was a man named Sidney Poitier. It was their turn — and they wanted you to know that they were their own men. They wanted you to be damn sure that they weren’t Sidney Poitier.
As Poitier says in the quote from his book: “Somehow, I got the impression that the threat of Sidney Poitier could only be allayed properly if it could be fixed so that he never worked again. I got those vibes from a lot of quarters.”
Poitier stopped acting in 1977, after directing and co-starring (with Bill Cosby) in A Piece of the Action. He continued to direct — sometimes successfully (Stir Crazy), sometimes less so (Hanky Panky, Fast Forward) — but he refrained from stepping over to the other side of the cameras.
This week, when the Touchstone Pictures action thriller Shoot to Kill opens at theaters and drive-ins everywhere, Poitier will be appearing on screen for the first time in more than a decade.
Why did he stay away so long? Why did one of America’s most popular actors, black or white, slip into a sabbatical? Was he simply tired of all the talk about “the threat of Sidney Poitier” by angry and embittered newcomers?
“If that were true,” Poitier responds after a few moments of reflection, “then I would be stepping away from a fight, would I not? And it’s not my nature to do that.
“I accepted the responsibilities attendant to my position. Either I assumed them or ignored them, and I could not ignore them. So I chose therefore to step up to them. And having chosen to step up to them, it couldn’t get too hot that I would step away from them.”
Maybe so. Still, he must have been stung by some of the more bitter comments made by other black actors and filmmakers in the ‘70s. Right?
“But that’s a part of the game, isn’t it? I mean, how much luck should one guy have? And especially if you put that question in the mouth of a guy who hasn’t had any luck at all, you’re going to get an answer that is reflective of how he feels.
“And how he feels is understandable. He feels, ‘Jesus Christ! One guy gets all the shots! And here I am —not only me, but there are 5,000 other guys who would want just one shot! And he’s got 500!’
“I cannot really come down on that guy for his judgment. I have to grin and bear it, and say, ‘That’s the way it is for now. And I’m the one who is carrying this ball. I’d better not fumble.’ Because I had a responsibility to take it as far as I could. And not let my head be distracted by the guy who’s wondering why I got the shot.”
Now, fortunately, he doesn’t have to worry about such distractions as he makes his eagerly awaited return to the movie screen. (Another film starring Poitier, Little Nikita, is scheduled for release March 4.) Now, as he turns 62, it’s much easier to be Sidney Poitier.
“Not only easier,” Poitier notes, “it’s a lot of fun nowadays. I have partners now.”
There are still many impediments to mainstream success for black actors, he concedes. “But I would prefer for us to concentrate on the pluses. Because the pluses have brought benefits to everyone. It has brought to the American public the remarkable talents of an Eddie Murphy. And it has allowed them to see the varying gifts of a Danny Glover and a Lou Gossett and a Denzel Washington.
“So if people wish to affix their dreams to the shoulders of actors, they have a variety of actors with which to do so. There was a time when my shoulders were the ones carrying all the dreams. And that was an impossibility.
“But that has changed, happily. I feel terrific. As a matter of fact, I feel like I’m an elder statesman of some kind, when I watch these younger actors who are all quite gifted. And they have a good fire in their guts, and it’s wonderful work that they’re doing. And they’re there, they’re doing it.
“I look at my absence as a period of time during which there has been some sound movement.”
But that brings up another question: Why did Sidney Poitier walk away from acting for so long? And, perhaps just as important, why did he decide the time was right to come back?
Poitier finds the second question much easier to answer: He read the script for Shoot to Kill, back when it was known as In the Hall of the Mountain King, and liked it.
He was taken by the plot, about a streetwise FBI agent (Poitier) who trails a vicious killer to the Pacific Northwest wilderness, and turns to a taciturn mountain guide (Tom Berenger) for help. The guide agrees to join the manhunt — but only because the killer has captured the guide’s girlfriend (Kirstie Alley).
“I thought it was quite arresting,” Poitier said, “in that, the two principal characters, each man was in the other’s world . . . each was, essentially, at the mercy of the other, when that was the case. And how their relationship became interdependent — that’s what fascinated me.”
Poitier describes Little Nikita as another “relationship movie,” with Poitier — coincidentally, cast as another FBI agent — investigating the background of an Air Force Academy applicant (River Phoenix). Much to their shared surprise, they discover the boy’s parents really are Russian agents who were smuggled in to the United States years ago.
During his short-lived reign at Columbia Pictures, producer David Puttnam personally contacted Poitier to offer him the Little Nikita project. Poitier accepted, partly because he liked the script, partly because he admired Puttnam, and partly because Columbia, the same company that released Buck and the Preacher, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? and To Sir, With Love, “has always been aces with me.
“But believe me when I tell you: I had no strong interest in getting back into acting again. We are driven by needs. And there was nothing left in acting that I felt I deserved, or had to have because it was denied me. There was nothing. I’ve had pictures that didn’t work. And I didn’t always get sensational reviews. But I knew that I was considered quite capable of delivering the goods.
“OK, that’s a wonderful thing to live with. Do you know what I mean? Therefore, I wasn’t there hankering to get back into acting during those 10 years.
“What I got during those 10 years were offers. There were not nearly as many as one’s ego might have wished. But there were a few. And they weren’t quite right, so I didn’t work. Had I not done these two pictures, I would be today with no hankering for work, no urge to run out and do it.”
Poitier spent most of his sabbatical with his wife, former actress Joanna Shimkus, and six daughters. He lives in Los Angeles in “a nice little house that was bought before everything went crazy. And my mortgage is meetable.” He feels free “to not run out and work for money.
“So where have I been? Well, I’ve been living. And quite well, I may say. Not materially, but in other ways, I’ve been living quite well. I’ve been discovering. I’ve been learning. I’ve been stretching. I’ve been extending myself in certain good areas. And I’ve been contemplating my navel a bit. Smelling flowers. And studying, on a lay level, astronomy. That’s what I’ve been doing.
“I went away for 10 years because it was time to do so. I had had a career that was extraordinary, remarkable. Absolutely remarkable. And given certain conditions, such as the historic period in America, socially and otherwise, and given the nature of the film industry as it was, as it had been constituted all those years from its inception, and given other things, the career was phenomenal.
“I arrived at a place where I felt, after 40 films, that I had done OK. And there was nothing left undone behind me. And as far as acting was concerned, I had no mountains to climb. Unlike too many actors who from time to time find themselves struggling to obtain the acceptance of their fellows or the critics, in terms of, ‘Accept me as an actor,’ I was able to fool everybody from the beginning.”
After we both stop laughing, Poitier continues.
“And having done so, I didn’t have to prove that all my career. So, 10 years ago, I decided to write a book. I did not intend to stay away 10 years — that was not blueprinted — but I simply chose to write a book. I sat down, and I wrote it. And then one year ran into another, and into another, and into another. And then in time, it was 10 years I’d been away.
“But I did not miss it. Did not miss it. And I came back for the two pictures. But I will probably not miss it if I stay away for any appreciable length of time again. Because life is not just filmmaking, to me.
“Life is a lot of other things — most of all, short. And because it is short, and because it is guaranteed short — even if we hit 86, or 97, it’s short when you stack it against infinity — then the question becomes, what you do with those years? And what I do with my years is important to me. And I want to spend them well. If I live another 20 years, I want to be 20 years improved from where I am. I want to be a better person.”
The limousine pulls up to the curb with just enough time to spare. (A Touchstone representative is inside the terminal, with another ticket, so don’t worry.) Poitier smiles, but doesn’t move just yet. There’s one more question to answer.
“How do I want to be remembered? That’s a fool’s errand. Because none of us are remembered very long, in fact. But when I go, I would like my life to have been such that it leaves an energy.
“And if it leaves an energy, I just would like it to be a positive one.”
