Hollywood's Cemetery Refused To Bury Hattie McDaniel. It Took Clark Gable's Father.

On February 29, 1940, at the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel, Hattie McDaniel won the supporting-actress Academy Award for Gone with the Wind, the first Oscar ever awarded to a Black performer. By The Hollywood Reporter's account (2015) she was seated not at the film's table but at a small table set against a far wall, and what she took home was a plaque, the type given to every supporting winner of the period. In August 1951 she suffered a stroke; advanced heart trouble, diabetes and breast cancer followed. On December 16, 1951 she signed a thirteen-page will. It asked for a white casket, white gardenias in her hair and her hands, and burial in the Hollywood Cemetery, and its last bequest read: "TO HOWARD UNIVERSITY of Washington, D.C., my 'Oscar' ..." She moved into the Motion Picture Country House, by one biographer's account (Watts, cited by Carter) the first Black patient admitted there. While she lived there, by Carter's reading of the probate file, the IRS attached liens to all of her property on June 13, June 14 and August 8, 1952, claiming $11,677.15 in taxes and penalties going back to 1949. She died at the Country House on October 26, 1952. She was not buried where she asked. In W. Burlette Carter's words (2011), the Hollywood Cemetery's "governing association did not allow blacks to be buried there, and McDaniel was no exception"; Discover Los Angeles says the cemetery remained segregated until 1959, and the cemetery's own site today says the times "would not allow a black woman to be buried on that property." She was buried at Rosedale, the first Los Angeles cemetery open to all races and creeds. In 1988 the Los Angeles Times, listing some of the less famous people buried at Hollywood Memorial Park, named Clark Gable's father. In probate, her Oscar became item 35: "metal statute (commonly known as 'Oscar')," "bequeathed to Howard University," and, in the state appraiser's handwriting, "no value." On December 1, 1954 the court instructed the executor to sell it with her remaining effects; item 35 is missing from the sale list of December 3, 1954 and from the final accounting, and when the estate closed on September 26, 1956 the court file gave no further indication of what became of it. In 1999 the cemetery's new owners dedicated a cenotaph to her beside its lake; her family declined to move her body. Where the Oscar went is told here as competing accounts, none of them settled. Carter, from the probate file, thinks either the executor lost control of it or it was sold and not recorded. A librarian's report of June 1961 records the actor Leigh Whipper donating "a plaque" to Howard; drama faculty and students describe an Oscar plaque in a glass case in the Childers Hall green room through the 1960s. In 1990 Howard sources told McDaniel's biographer Carlton Jackson, unofficially, that it went missing during the civil rights demonstrations; in 1992 Jet reported officials speculating it was stolen, removed for safekeeping or misplaced; in 2007 a collector repeated a rumour that it was thrown into the Potomac. Carter's own theory is that it was returned to Howard's Channing Pollack Theater Collection around 1971-72; a 1973 inventory of Howard's Moorland collection found no Oscar, and Howard declined comment to The Hollywood Reporter in 2015. On October 1, 2023 the Academy presented Howard with a replacement. Sourced chiefly from W. Burlette Carter, "Finding the Oscar," 55 Howard Law Journal 107 (2011), which reads the Los Angeles County probate file; with The Hollywood Reporter (2015), the Los Angeles Times (1988), Discover Los Angeles, Hollywood Forever's own history page, The Washington Post (2010), CNN and TheWrap (2023), TCM, Curbed LA (2018), American Heritage and the Wikipedia articles on Hattie McDaniel, Hollywood Forever Cemetery and Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery. With film from the 1939 Gone with the Wind screen test and teaser, a 1939 Atlanta premiere newsreel, The Ed Wynn Show (CBS, 1949) and Beulah (ABC, filmed 1951). This is a documentary. Every photograph is a real archival, press or publicity photograph, and every clip is real film or television tape; quotes are the speakers' own words or are attributed to the source that reported them. There is no colourisation. There are no AI-generated images.