Joey Bishop named the six most vicious racist actors of old Hollywood golden age history. Joey Bishop was the quiet one in the Rat Pack and Frank Sinatra called him the hub of the big wheel because Bishop wrote most of the material that made the group famous. He had his own talk show, subbed for Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show, and outlived Sinatra, Martin, Davis, and Laughford, making him the last surviving member of the Rat Pack, which meant he carried six decades of memories that the other four took to their graves. Among those
memories were the names of the stars whose racism he watched destroy lives up close, including the studio head who sent mobsters to threaten his close friend with permanent injury for the crime of dating a white woman. the beloved comedian whose entire career was built on painting his face dark and performing someone else’s identity as entertainment and the song and dance man America loved on screen who became a politician specifically to vote against giving black Americans equal rights.
Some of these stories come from verified interviews and public records. Others come from biographies, memoirs, and accounts from people who were there. These are the six most vicious racist actors of old Hollywood’s golden age. Number six, Eddie Caner. The comedian whose career was built on blackface. Eddie Caner dominated Vodivville, Broadway, radio, and early television during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.
And at his peak, his radio show reached 40 million listeners a week, making him one of the most heard voices in America. A comedian, singer, dancer, and actor who won a special academy award for distinguished service to the film industry and was considered a national treasure. Caner built a significant portion of that career performing in blackface.
And from his early days in vaudeville through his biggest Broadway hits, including Kid Boots and Whoopi, he regularly performed with darkened skin, exaggerated lips, and rolling eyes, mimicking black performers for laughs in front of white audiences who found the caricature hilarious. The 1930 film version of Whoopi, one of the first major Technicolor productions, featured Caner in extensive blackface sequences that were marketed as highlights of the film.
And he was not playing a black character in a dramatic role, but performing a racial caricature designed to make white audiences laugh at the expense of black identity. What made Caner’s case particularly complicated was that offstage he was known for supporting some progressive causes, helping raise money for Jewish refugees during World War II.
being involved in charitable work throughout his career and reportedly helping Eddie Rochester Anderson land his role on the Jack Benny Show and his defenders pointed to these moments as evidence that Caner was not truly racist. Bishop came up through the same vaudeville and nightclub circuit that Caner had dominated a generation earlier, and a colleague recalled him saying that Caner could write a check to a charity in the afternoon and paint his face dark for a show that same evening and see no conflict between the two, and
that the ability to help people while simultaneously mocking their identity for profit was something only a man who did not truly see black people as equals could manage. Number five, Lee J. Cobb. The star of 12 Angry Men who broke under pressure and destroyed careers, Lee J. Cobb delivered one of the most celebrated performances in American cinema as juror number three in the 1957 film 12 Angry Men, a meditation on justice, prejudice, and the courage to stand alone against the crowd.
And his performance as the angry hold out who slowly comes to accept the truth earned him a permanent place in Hollywood history. Behind that performance lived a man who in real life had done the opposite of what his character eventually did. Surrendering to pressure rather than standing on principle. While the people who paid for his cowardice were the very communities his most famous film asked audiences to protect.
1953 brought Cobb before the House unamerican activities committee as a cooperative witness where he named 20 colleagues he identified as communists or communist sympathizers feeding the blacklist that would devastate the entertainment industry for the next decade. Cobb later admitted he cooperated because the FBI and the committee had threatened to destroy his career if he refused, describing himself as being in a state of emotional and financial desperation when he made the decision.
What connected Cobb’s testimony to racism was the same machinery that connected every cooperative witness to racial injustice. Because the committee systematically targeted performers who supported civil rights, using accusations of communism as weapons against anyone who advocated for racial equality, which meant every name Cobb gave the committee fed a system that disproportionately punished black performers and their white allies, ending careers not because people were communists, but because they had attended civil rights meetings or signed
petitions supporting integration. Bishop witnessed the aftermath of the blacklist from inside the entertainment industry. watching talented performers disappear from television and film because someone had named them in testimony and a colleague recalled him observing that Cobb played a man who learned to stand up for justice in 12 Angry Men and then went home and did the opposite in real life and that Hollywood gave him awards for pretending to have courage he never actually possessed.
Number four, Peter Sers, the genius who performed in Brownface for laughs. Peter Sers ranked among the most brilliant comedic actors of the 20th century with performances in Doctor Strange Love and the Pink Panther series establishing him as a master of disguise and character transformation who could become anyone on screen shifting between accents, physicalities and personalities with a fluidity that few actors in history have matched.
1968 brought the party a film directed by Blake Edwards in which sellers played run vi Bashi an Indian actor invited to a Hollywood party by mistake performing the role in full brown face with darkened skin and exaggerated accent and physical mannerisms designed to portray Indian people as bumbling confused and out of place in western society reducing an entire culture to a comedic stereotype the party arrived in the same year Martin Luther King Jr.
was assassinated. The same year, racial tensions in America erupted into the most widespread civil unrest of the decade. And the same year the entertainment industry was being forced to confront its own history of racial mockery, which meant sellers performed a racial caricature at the exact moment in American history when the country was being asked to examine why racial caricatures were harmful.
Sellers never expressed public regret for the role. And unlike Blake Edwards, who eventually expressed remorse for Mickey Rooney’s performance in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, sellers treated the Boxy character as one of his finest comedic creations, considering it acting rather than racism, a distinction lost on the people whose culture he had turned into a punchline.
Bishop built his own comedy career on wit and timing rather than racial mockery. And a colleague recalled him saying that Sers was the funniest man in the world and he chose to use that talent to make fun of how Indian people talk and walk. And that when a genius uses his gift to mock someone’s race, it is worse than when a mediocre comedian does it because the genius had a thousand other options and chose the crulest one.
Number three, George Murphy. The song and dance man who became a senator to fight civil rights. George Murphy appeared in films like Broadway Melody of 1938 and For Me and My Gal alongside Judy Garland during his years as one of MGM’s most popular musical performers. Charming on screen, light on his feet, and representing the kind of wholesome entertainment audiences associated with the golden age of Hollywood.
1964 brought Murphy’s transformation from entertainer to politician when he ran for the United States Senate in California and won, becoming one of the first Hollywood actors to successfully transition into national politics. And almost immediately upon arriving in Washington, he began using his political power to oppose the very civil rights legislation that was transforming the country.
Murphy voted against key provisions of the Civil Rights Act and opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, placing himself directly on the wrong side of the most important moral question of his era, which meant the man America had watched dance and sing his way through lightigh-hearted musicals, was now casting votes in the United States Senate to deny black Americans the right to equal treatment under the law.
Murphy also served as president of the Screen Actors Guild before his Senate run, the same position Ronald Reagan would later hold. And during his time as SAG president, he did nothing to address the systemic exclusion of black performers from leading roles or equitable pay. Bishop was politically aware and had his own talk show during the same years Murphy served in the Senate.
And a colleague recalled him saying that Murphy danced with Judy Garland on screen and then went to Washington and voted to keep black Americans out of the places where Judy Garland movies were shown and that turning fame into political power just to use it against people who never did anything to you was one of the worst things a human being could do. Number two, Ronald Reagan.
From Hollywood to the politics of racial division before he became president of the United States, Ronald Reagan appeared in over 50 films throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, starring alongside Errol Flynn in Santa Fe Trail and playing George Gip in Koot Rock All-American. Never a major star, but a working actor who understood the industry and built connections that would serve him for the rest of his life.
Reagan served as president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1947 to 1952 and again briefly in 1959. And during his tenure, he cooperated with the FBI by providing information about colleagues he suspected of communist sympathies, helping fueled the blacklist that destroyed careers across the industry, a blacklist that disproportionately targeted performers who supported civil rights and racial equality.
As Reagan transitioned from Hollywood into politics, his rhetoric increasingly relied on racially coded language that civil rights leaders recognized immediately. And during his 1976 presidential campaign, he popularized the welfare queen narrative, describing a woman from Chicago’s Southside who allegedly drove a Cadillac while collecting welfare checks, an exaggerated and racialized story that became a powerful political weapon, linking public assistance to black Americans in the minds of millions of white voters. Reagan opposed the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, calling them government overreach. And as governor of California, he signed the Mulford Act in 1967, which restricted the open carrying of firearms, specifically in response to Black Panther members legally carrying weapons in public, which meant the man who would later become the most celebrated champion of gun rights in American political history, signed one of the most restrictive gun laws in California history, the moment black Americans exercised their Second Amendment rights.
The Mulford Act passed with bipartisan support because both parties agreed on one thing, that black men with legal firearms were more frightening than any policy debate about the Second Amendment. Reagan also launched his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the town where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964, using the occasion to talk about states rights, a phrase every civil rights leader in America recognized as coded language for allowing states to maintain racial segregation. And the choice of
location was not an accident, but a signal to white southern voters about whose side Reagan was on, delivered from the exact patch of ground where civil rights workers had been killed for trying to register black voters. Bishop watched Reagan’s transformation from fellow actor to politician. And a colleague recalled him saying that Reagan learned in Hollywood how to play a character so convincingly that the audience believes you are the character.
And he took that skill to Washington and played the role of a man who cared about all Americans. while writing policies designed to leave millions of them behind. And the only difference between his acting career and his political career was that in politics, the people he was performing for could not change the channel. Number one, Harry Conn.
The studio head who sent mobsters after a man for dating a white woman. Harry Conn served as president and production director of Colombia Pictures from its founding until his death in 1958, controlling the careers of some of the biggest stars in the industry, including Rita Hworth, Kim Novak, and dozens of others.
And he was known throughout the industry as a tyrant who ruled his studio with absolute authority, and who viewed his contracted performers as property he owned rather than artists he employed. 1957 brought the discovery that changed everything. When Conn found out his biggest female star, Kim Novak, was in a romantic relationship with Sammy Davis Jr.
and Novak was white and Davis was black. And in 1957, an interracial relationship involving a major Hollywood star was considered one of the most dangerous threats to a studio’s bottom line. What Conn did next was not a harsh conversation or a professional ultimatum, but violence. Because according to multiple documented accounts, including a BBC documentary, Davis’s own autobiography, and investigative reporting by Vanity Fair in the Smithsonian, Conn contacted organized crime figures with whom he had long-standing relationships. Johnny
Rosselli, a notorious gangster with ties to the Chicago mob, was brought in, and gangster Mickey Cohen contacted Sammy Davis Senior and delivered a message that was as simple as it was horrifying. If Sammy Davis Jr. did not end his relationship with Kim Novak and marry a black woman within 48 hours.
They would take out his one remaining eye and break both of his legs. Davis had already lost his left eye in a car accident in 1954, which meant the threat was not abstract, but specific, targeted, and designed to exploit the most painful vulnerability of a man who had already suffered a devastating injury.
Davis was terrified, and had no way to protect himself from the mafia. And within days, he contacted Laurier White, a singer he had briefly dated. And on January 10th of 1958, they were married in the Emerald Room at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. The marriage was not real, but survival, and Davis paid White $25,000 before they divorced 6 months later.
Novak was devastated, later telling interviewers that she never saw Davis as a color, but saw his tremendous talent and sense of humor and felt wonderful just being around someone that great. And when Larry King asked her about Conn’s intervention on CNN in 2004, Novak confirmed that it happened and expressed anger that anyone would claim the right to dictate who she could love based on the color of their skin.
Bishop was there, a member of the same rat pack, watching his friend Sammy Davis Jr. go from performing in front of thousands of adoring fans to receiving threats from organized crime figures because he had committed the sin of loving a white woman. Watching Sammy enter a fake marriage to save his own body from destruction.
Watching the fear in his friend’s eyes and the resignation of a man who understood that no amount of talent, fame, or money could protect a black man in America from the people who decided he had crossed a line. The Novak incident was not even the first time Conn used his power to destroy a black performer’s career over race.
Because years earlier, singer and pianist Hazel Scott protested the degrading costumes black women were scripted to wear in the 1943 film The Heats On. And Conn eventually relented on the costumes, but made good on a vow that Hazel Scott would never set foot on a Hollywood studio as long as he lived, effectively blacklisting one of the most talented black performers of her era from the entire film industry through a single man’s grudge over a costume dispute.
Con died of a heart attack in February of 1958, just weeks after the threats against Davis. And at his funeral, the crowd was enormous. And when someone commented on the large turnout, comedian Red Skelton, reportedly observed that it only proved the old adage that if you give the people what they want, they will come out for it.
Hollywood mourned a man who had sent gangsters to threaten a performer’s life over the color of his skin, and the industry moved on as if nothing had happened. A colleague recalled Bishop saying that Harry Conn sent gangsters to threaten a man’s life because he went on a date with a white woman and that everyone in Hollywood knew it happened and nobody did a single thing about it.
And that the silence of an entire industry in the face of a mob threat against a man for the crime of being black and famous was the most vicious act of racism Bishop had ever witnessed. Not because of what Con did, but because of what everyone else did not do. What Joey Bishop saw from inside the circle.
Joey Bishop was the quiet one, the observer, the man who watched everything from a seat nobody else in America occupied, inside the Rat Pack, inside Hollywood, inside the nightclubs and recording studios and backstage areas where the truth about these people came out. The moment the audience went home, Eddie Caner painted his face dark and built an empire on racial mockery while writing checks to charity with the same hands. Lee J.
Cobb played a man who learned to stand up for justice on screen and then named 20 colleagues to the blacklist in real life. Peter Sers used the greatest comedic talent of his generation to mock how Indian people talk and walk. George Murphy danced with Judy Garland and then went to Washington to vote against civil rights for black Americans.
Ronald Reagan learned to play a character so convincingly that America elected him president while he wrote policies designed to leave millions behind. and Harry Conn sent mobsters to threaten to blind and a man for dating a white woman while the entire entertainment industry watched and said nothing. Bishop saw all of it, sitting in the same rooms as these people, shaking their hands, performing alongside them, and carrying those stories for decades until he was the last one left.
The quiet one remembered everything. Which revelation shocked you most? Did you know about these documented incidents before today?
