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Gertrude Jeannette, New York cab driver and Broadway actress – obituary
Gertrude Jeannette, who has died aged 103, was the first woman in New York to obtain a motorcycle licence and one of the first women in the city to drive a cab; she also overcame a speech impediment to become an actress, appearing on Broadway in more than 200 performances of the musical Lost in the Stars, but then found herself blacklisted during the McCarthy era.
She was born Gertrude Hadley on a farm at Urbana, in the south of Arkansas, on November 28 1914, the daughter of Willis and Salley Hadley. As a child she had three ambitions: to play basketball, to perform motorcycle stunts and to be an actress. The first two she achieved in her teens.
She went to a segregated school in Little Rock and was set to go to university, but instead eloped to New York in 1933 with Joe Jeannette II, a former heavyweight boxer whom she married. She taught swimming and basketball, playing in the Bluebirds team that won the state championship for four consecutive years.
Her husband was a keen motorcyclist, racing professionally with the Harlem Dusters motorcycle club. In 1935 Gertrude Jeannette acquired her New York licence and the couple would think nothing of riding to California or Texas and back.
Soon after the outbreak of war, and with manpower short, Gertrude Jeannette began driving a New York cab, wearing her trademark cap and a leather jacket. “I was one of only three women out of a group of 90 that passed with a perfect mark,” she recalled of taking her cab driver’s licence.
On her first day she made the mistake of pulling up in front of the Waldorf-Astoria. “In those days they didn’t allow black drivers to work downtown,” she told the New York Daily News in 2011. “You had to work uptown.”
A male taxi driver cut in front of her. “I rammed my fender under his fender, swung it over the right and ripped it,” she recalled, adding that the other driver got out of his cab and screamed: “A woman driver! A woman driver!”
With the return of male taxi drivers after the war it became clear that a woman was no longer welcome. Gertrude Jeannette now decided to tackle her childhood stammer. She joined the American Negro Theater and worked with a handful of off-Broadway groups while taking book-keeping classes in the basement of a Baptist church.
Meanwhile, she was involved in the civil rights movement, recalling how her husband was a bodyguard when Paul Robeson visited Peekskill, New York, in 1949, protecting the black baritone from the Ku Klux Klan. “This is the first time I saw the robes and everything,” she recalled with horror.
Without even a review to her name to her name Gertrude Jeannette was cast as Mrs Kumalo in Lost in the Stars by Maxwell Anderson and Kurt Weill, which opened at the Music Box Theatre in October 1949.
Over the next decade she was prevented from working because of her association with Robeson, something she discussed in the documentary Scandalise My Name: Stories from the Blacklist (1998).
Gertrude Jeannette was back on Broadway in 1960 in The Long Dream, based on Richard Wright’s book set in the South, but it closed after only five performances.
She continued to act, taking parts in plays such as Nobody Loves an Albatross, a satire of the television industry, and in films such as Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970) and The Legend of Nigger Charley (1972).
In 1979 she founded the Hadley Players in Harlem, from where she mentored African-American actors, often drawing on material from her taxi-driving days.
Gertrude Jeannette’s husband predeceased her.
Gertrude Jeannette, born November 28 1914, died April 4 2018