Life After ‘Frank’s Place’

There have been wide protests about the canceling of CBS-TV’s “Frank’s Place,” the remarkable series set at a black-owned restaurant in Louisiana. But despite awards and a sheaf of encouraging reviews “Frank’s Place” has died of insufficient audiences. Part of the problem was a time-slot that wouldn’t stay put. But no matter.

The cancellation is a particular blow to Frances E. Williams, who at 83 can fairly be called the matriarch of black actresses. She played Miss Marie on “Frank’s Place,” a plum assignment to crown a career that has lasted the better part of seven decades and that has been a long and continuing fight for more work and less stereotyped roles for black performers.

“I remember when we were taping the first episode. Roscoe Lee Browne was a guest performer and he said it was a pioneering venture, a series black actors could be proud of.”

It was. Created by Hugh Wilson and starring Tim Reid as the often-beleaguered man who has inherited the bar-restaurant, “Frank’s Place” mixed humor and pathos, and saw its characters, blacks and whites alike, as individuals not types.

In one award-winning episode, “The Bridge,” a black man dying of cancer arranges a fatal accident to look like the result of drunk-driving so his impoverished widow can get some money by suing the restaurant, where he was presumably allowed to drink too much. It was a lot of plot for a half-hour, yet the episode told its story and said a good deal about a shared humanity.

At the other side of the spectrum, Williams says she once made a stir by refusing 17 different bandannas for her role in the Howard Keel-Kathryn Grayson remake of “Show Boat.”

Appearing in the 1946 film “Magnificent Doll,” with Ginger Rogers as President James Madison’s wife, Dolly, she pointed out to the star that there were no blacks in any of the crowd scenes. Williams says Rogers agreed it was wrong and was able to have inserts shot and spliced in.

“I came out to Hollywood in 1941,” Williams said the other afternoon. “My husband said he was determined to come out here and I’d best come along. I did, but I didn’t work in the movies for five years because the only roles I could find were ones where I had to wear bandannas.”

She worked instead at the adventurous little theaters like The Circle, The Cosmos and Actors Lab. Charlie Chaplin was on the board at The Circle. There weren’t many film people involved in those days, she says, although William Schallert and Kathleen Freeman were regulars.

Williams was born in East Orange, N.J., and started working--as a baby-sitter--at 5. The family moved to Cleveland, and when she was 16, Williams helped to build Karamu Theatre, now the oldest continuing black theater in the country.

Ultimately she worked at Karamu for 14 years as actress, teacher, director and writer and, for a time, operator of the company’s children’s camp. She met Paul Robeson at the Cleveland Playhouse and he became a big influence in her life, urging her to get more training.

“In 1934,” Williams says, “I sold everything I had. I ended up with $72, enough for a round-trip ticket to Russia.” She learned Russian and taught Sergei Eisenstein’s wife English. She worked at the Meyerhold Theater and at Natalie Satz’s children’s theater.

She stayed for two years and then resettled in New York where she began to get stage work, appearing on Broadway and then touring with “You Can’t Take It With You.”

When she came home she also appeared in two films for Oscar Micheaux, the early independent black director . The films are still shown occasionally. “And if you don’t think it’s an experience to see yourself on the screen 52 years later. . . . O, my,” Williams says.

In Hollywood she became an activist in the cause of black actors. She served 20 years on the board of Actors’ Equity and was instrumental in the formation of a Minority Actors Committee in the Screen Actors Guild. Ronald Reagan, then president of SAG, abolished the committee, Williams says, although it was later revived.

She followed Claudia McNeil in the company of “Raisin in the Sun.” “Lloyd Michael directed me and I cried. It was the first time I’d had a director who saw me as a person not an object.”

Williams has had a part in forming nine theater companies, she says, including the East-West Players and the Inner City Repertory Company. (“The dream began in my kitchen,” Williams says.) She also founded the Frances Williams Corner Theater, which still flourishes in a building behind her home in the Exposition Park area.

“I had to have the theater to balance what I was doing in Hollywood. You can’t survive without a way to balance your life. We do plays about events in black history that are not well known.

“You have to be positive. You have to take responsibility for clarifying who you are.”

The 22 episodes of “Frank’s Place” that were made are probably not enough for syndication. The experience is over, a source of regret not least because the cast had developed a strong family feeling.

It’s a sharp disappointment. “But when life is full and you keep it full, you go on,” Williams says. At 83, she hasn’t run out of causes, or energy.