Raymond St. Jacques 1930–1990

Actor

At a Glance…

Worked His Way to the Top

The Next Black Superstar

Days of Bit Parts and Voice-Overs

Sources

In the late 1960s actor Raymond St. Jacques emerged as one of black Hollywood’s top leading men, starring in blaxploitation films Uptight, If He Hollers Let Him Go, and A Change of Mind, and hitting it big as Coffin Ed Johnson in Cotton Comes to Harlem. St. Jacques’s career as a leading man faltered after the failure of his 1973 self-produced feature Book of Numbers, and he survived the late 1970s and the 1980s doing voice-overs for commercials and character roles in films and television. For a time he was the only black regular on the night-time soap opera Falcon Crest. St. Jacques died of cancer of the lymph glands on August 27, 1990.

Raymond St. Jacques was born on March 1, 1930, in Hartford, Connecticut. Named James Arthur Johnson after his father, he was raised by his mother, Vivienne Johnson, who supported him and another child through odd jobs. St. Jacques attended Hillhouse High School in New Haven, Connecticut and wanted to study at nearby Yale University. Unfortunately he had neither the money nor the grades for Yale. “I used to wash dishes at Yale,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times, “I was raised in New Haven, and of course at that time in the ’40s, I think it was every black person’s hope to get into Yale.” “It was so funny,” he told the New York Times, “because you’d see an awful lot of the brothers walking around with their college clothes on and books under their arms when really they were only washing dishes in the dining room like me.”

When he was 18 St. Jacques almost turned to a life of crime. He planned a robbery in New York City but was caught by the police. Sent to the Tombs Prison, he refused even to give his name. “I was down there in the jail cell and some of the older prisoners were beginning to look at me kinda funny,” St. Jacques told the Chicago Sun-Times. “That was definitely a turning point!” After his trial—at which he received a suspended sentence—the judge summoned St. Jacques to his chambers. “I went back [there],” St. Jacques told the Chicago Sun-Times, “and Mama was crying—she worked as a maid, worked hard—and [the judge] looked at me and got up and said, ‘Do you see what you have done for your mother? She’s a hardworking woman.’ And all of a sudden, boom!, he laid me right out on that floor. And I ain’t ever been back since.”

In the early 1950s, after a brief enlistment in the Air Force, St. Jacques went to New York City to become an actor. He worked with drama coaches Lee Nemitz and Herbert Berghof and studied movement at the Ballet Russe. He was cast in a

At a Glance…

Born Charles Arthur Johnson, March 1, 1930, in Hartford, CT; changed name to Raymond St Jacques in the 1950s; died of cancer, August 27, 1990, in Los Angeles, CA; son of James Arthur and Vivienne (a medical technician) Johnson; children: Raymond, Sterling. Education: Studied at Actors Studio, New York, NY; American Shakespeare Festival Academy, New York and Connecticut; and with Herbert Berghof, New York.

Worked variously as a dishwasher, houseboy, model, and Bloomingdale’s salesman in New York City. Stage actor appearing in The Blacks, 1960; American Shakespeare Festival, Stratford, CT, fencing director, 1960s; film actor appearing in Black Like Me, 1964; The Pawnbroker, 1965; If He Hollers, Let Him Go, 1968; Uptight, 1968; Change of Mind, 1969; Cotton Comes to Harlem, 1970; Come Back Charleston Blue, 1972; (also director and producer) Book of Numbers, 1973; They Live, 1988; and Glory, 1990; television actor appearing in Rawhide, 1965; and Superior Court, 1988-90.

few minor off-Broadway roles and was a dancer and chorus singer in the Broadway musical Seventh Heaven. Eventually, through some artful invention, he began getting roles in Shakespearean dramas. “I lied and said I went to Yale,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times. “At that time in the 1940s and 1950s to get into theater I thought black people had to be overqualified and that’s how I got into the American Shakespeare Festival—by making myself overqualified.”

Worked His Way to the Top

St. Jacques worked for several years with the San Diego, New York, and American Shakespeare Festivals. He taught fencing with the American Festival group in Stratford, Connecticut, where he also staged battle scenes. “Those were the days,” St. Jacques told Ebony, “when a black actor had to know how to do just about everything, had to tell a few lies here and there and even had to come up with a name that was sort of exotic. I was ‘James West’ for a while, then ‘Roy Johnson.’ Then I came up with this ‘Raymond St. Jacques,’ and everybody thought I was from some island…. The fact is, I just wanted a real long name—something that would look impressive on programs and fill up the screen.”

By 1959 St. Jacques was back in New York where he joined the famed Actors’ Studio and studied with Lee Strasburg. He began getting minor roles in off-Broadway productions such as High Name Today, The Cool World, and Night Life. In 1961 he landed a role in Jean Genet’s long-running play, The Blacks. For St. Jacques it was a turning point. It, “really established me as a serious actor,” he told Ebony.

It was also during The Blacks that he got some key advice. “The way you move, the way you use your face and your voice,” fellow actor Roscoe Lee Brown told him, according to Ebony, “everything … gives me a feeling that your medium is films. I have a feeling that you’re going to move in that direction real soon, and you ought to have yourself ready when the time comes.”

In fact, the camera did become St. Jacques’s friend. After touring with the traveling company of A Raisin In the Sun, he began making guest appearances on such television shows as The Defenders; East Side, West Side; Slattery’s People; and Doctor Kildare. “A lot of those things,” he told Ebony, “were part of what actors call ‘paying our dues.’ You carry a spear, be a face in a crowd there, do all kind of bit parts in order to learn all you can about the craft and get yourself known.”

In 1964 St. Jacques made his film debut in the James Widmore feature Black Like Me. The following year he appeared as “Tangee,” a Harlem gangster, in The Pawnbroker, Sidney Lumet’s picture about an emotionally dead concentration camp survivor. But his career really began to take off in 1965 after he was cast as Civil War veteran Simon Blake in TV’s Rawhide. Though Blake was “the token black cowboy who watered the horses when the whites went into the bar for drinks,” according to the New York Times, St. Jacques’s “color worked to his advantage,” according to Donald Bogle, author of Blacks in American Films and Television. “The white actors playing the leads [were] so interchangeable (and so plastic),” Bogle continued, “that St. Jacques, in comparison, had a distinct brown freshness and individuality.”

By 1966 St. Jacques was working steadily in films. He was cast in the 1966 James Garner comedy Mister Buddwing and in 1967 he played Concasseur, the sadistic head of the Haitian “Tonton Macoute” in the Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor political thriller, The Comedians. The New York Times described this second performance as “smooth and terrifying” and Bogle lauded its “manufactured machismo” that “jolted audiences.”

After roles in John Wayne’s war film, The Green Berets, and in the Robert Mitchum vehicle, Mr. Moses, St. Jacques got star billing for the first time in the film Up Tigh t. A black remake of John Ford’s 1935 film The Informer, Up Tight had a relatively poor critical reception. Nevertheless, St. Jacques, who played the leader of a militant group, was called “fine and lean” by Vincent Canby of the New York Times.

St. Jacques’s next film was 1968’s If He Hollers Let Him Go. Critics again panned the picture but black audiences went in droves. St. Jacques was realistic about the film’s appeal. “Artistically it was a fake,” he told Ebony, “but the ‘brothers’ loved it because I kicked hell out of a white man.” For its part, the New York Times trashed If He Hollers but wrote, “St. Jacques is a splendid actor who conveys coiled tension and honesty like an intelligent looking cobra. He has no business here.”

The Next Black Superstar

St. Jacques reveled in his status as the next black superstar. The New York Times called him “a black Lee Marvin,” and Ebony referred to him as “Raymond The Magnificent.” He ate at fancy restaurants; drove a classic 1954 Bentley; and bought a triple-wing, ten room, Beverly Hills mansion. In a 1977 interview with Ebony he recalled taking six friends to Paris one new Year’s Eve and picking up a $750 check for diner at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. “The whole thing is just one big fun game with me and I don’t take much of it very seriously,” he told Ebony in 1969. “But none of the things I do—the way I live, the clothes, the cars—none of these things are for show. If there’s any flamboyance in them, then that flamboyance is me. It’s the way I am, and I’ve always been this way—even when I had to worry about paying the bills.”

After playing the lead in A Change of Mind, a body switch picture in which St. Jacques portrayed a black man walking around with a white man’s mind, he had what was probably his biggest hit, 1970’s Cotton Comes to Harlem. In the film, which was directed by Ossie Davis, St. Jacques played Coffin Ed Johnson, one half of a comic black detective duo invented by black writer Chester Himes. Cotton Comes To Harlem was described in Black Action Films as “The first really successful black action film.” Donald Bogle called it “a rambunctious joyride through Harlem with many a bump and pothole along the way.” Variety wrote that St. Jacques’s performance was “easily the best in the film.”

After Cotton, St. Jacques’s star status began to wane. The film’s sequel, Come Back Charleston Blue, bombed, and St. Jacques had to take supporting roles in black action films like Cool Breeze and The Final Comedown. In 1973 St. Jacques released Book of Numbers, a film he directed as well as produced and played the leading role. Financed with $700,000 from Brut Productions, Book of Numbers concerned two city waiters—St. Jacques and Philip Michael Thomas—who set up a numbers racket in a small southern town in the 1930s. “I didn’t want to glorify the numbers racket per se,” St. Jacques told the New York Times, “Rather, I wanted to document the life style of the ‘colored’ people of the period and relate it to the black lifestyle of today.”

Book of Numbers was a critical success. “The film’s ambitions are modest but largely realized,” Variety wrote. “[It is] a relatively simple, uncompromising, candid evocation of a corner of an era … [and] an unabashed little picture that gets most of the way it intended and that’s something the filmmakers can be proud of.” Despite critical praises, Book of Numbers was not a financial bonanza. In fact, afterwards St. Jacques even had a problem getting cast. “I wasn’t that stereotypical black that they wanted to see,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times. With no leading man roles and no offers to direct, he had to economize. “What I did,” he told Ebony, “was to go down to the unemployment office and collect my check.”

Days of Bit Parts and Voice-Overs

While St. Jacques’s days as a leading man were clearly over by the mid 1970s, he knew the business well-enough to keep working. He returned to the stage, took character parts in films, appeared as a guest on weekly television programs, took roles in made-for-television movies, and employed his silky, deep baritone to make commercial voice-overs for products such as 7-Up, Pacific Bell, Ford, Coca-Cola, and Hawaiian Punch.

St. Jacques returned to the spotlight again in the mid-1980s when he appeared as a doctor in several episodes of TV’s Falcon Crest. Here, as in Rawhide, “his presence, his color, and his attitude made him seem a ‘real’ figure in contrast with the otherwise predictable all-white world of the nighttime soaps,” wrote Bogle. A second television success came in 1988, when he was tapped to play Judge Clayton Thomas in the syndicated Superior Court. The show, which reenacted California criminal trials, seemed tame for the once adventurous and politically conscious St. Jacques. Asked why he took the part he responded, “I hadn’t had any other offers…. They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse—a great deal of money,” according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

In the late 1980s St. Jacques continued to take minor film roles. He played a bar owner in 1987’s The Wild Pair, a street preacher in 1988’s They Live, and in 1989, he had a cameo as abolitionist Frederick Douglass in Glory. Variety called this final performance, “magisterial.” On July 30, 1990, Raymond St. Jacques was hospitalized for treatment of cancer of the lymph glands. He died less than a month later, on August 27, 1990.

Sources

Books

Black Action Films, McFarland & Co., 1989, pp. 65-6, 101-02, 111-12, 175-76.

The Black Man on Film: Racial Stereotyping, Hayden Book Company, 1974, pp. 79-83.

Blacks in American Films and Television: An Encyclopedia, Garland, 1988, pp. 68-9, 466-67.

To Find an Image: Black Films From Uncle Tom to Super Fly, Bobbs-Merrill, 1973, pp. 159, 171.

Periodicals

Chicago Sun-Times, August 31, 1988, p. 37.

Ebony, June 1967, p. 171; November 1969, pp. 175-78; May 1977, p. 141.

Los Angeles Times, August 29, 1990.

New York Times, April 21, 1965, p. 51; October 12, 1966, p. 36; November 1, 1967, p. 37; March 30, 1968, p. 22; August 25, 1968; October 10, 1968 p. 57; December 19, 1968, p. 60; May 13, 1973.

Variety, December 18, 1968; October 8, 1969; June 10, 1970; March 22, 1972; July 5, 1972; April 11, 1973; September 6, 1978; February 13, 1980; November 9, 1988; December 13, 1989.

—Jordan Wankoff