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Show MOVIES i Sidney ft: A i J i7V I get me. But she was 2,000 miles away, and what could she do? There was just me." At 17 Poitier joined the Army. Ahigh IQ sent him into psychotherapy training and then, as an orderly, to a veterans' hosptal for the violently disturbed. Poitier seems to have closed his mind to this personal nightmare, but apparently deranged patients haunted him less than fellow technicians from large soldiers, all cities. They so magnified Poitier's awareness of his inadequacies that he suffered nervous exhaustion and was discharged. t, "I had tried everything," Poitier says, "and it was no good." Then he read an ad for students not long ago. 1 She was 68. She had liyed a full life, a hard one. When I looked into her f afce for the last time, I took stock. X BURIED MY MOTHER "Half my life is gone. I have been a restless, driven man for most of my 37 years. Why? Just to feed an ego that leads into untenable positions, drives me beyond natural capabilities and into perpetual dissatisfactions." The words are Sidney Poitier's. They, voice the bewildered appraisal of an amazing life which has brought wealth and acclaim against great odds yet Mt "rpstleaa, driven man." In 1959 Poitier became the first Negro nomi nated for a major Academy Award for his performance in "The Defiant Ones," and this year he is up again for an Oscar for his starring role in "Lilies of the Field." Next fall he will play Othello in a major Broadway production. Until recently any mention of these successes would bring from Poitier a standard reaction: "Acting is just a beginning. I'm writing a play! Later, when I get the wherewithal, I'm going to produce and direct." What Poitier will do in the future, he alone knows. But a look into the past gives a good idea of what Poitier has been trying to prove as a "driven man." son of a y At 10, Sidney was the prosperous tomato farmer on Cat Island in the happy-go-luck- Bahamas, "swimming, fishing, climbing trees, and never thinking about school." At 12, he was an awkward country boy foundering in Nassau. His father had lost his farm in the Depression and moved his family (Sidney was the youngest of eight) to the "big city." At 14, he was shipped to his eldest brother's home in Miami because his father feared Sidney was headed for a reform school. "But Cyril had five kids of his own," he recalls now, "and Miami was even more incomprehensible to an island boy than Nassau." Poitier had the singsong accent of a West Indian and a wide-eye- d naivete that made him the butt of cruel practical jokes. Slowly he was assuming the role which would scar him for years to come, the role of oafish outlander in a sophisticated world that alternately laughed at him and terrified him. to Nassau," Poitier says. X "My parents had all that two good people uT COULDN'T GO BACK could bear. I used to dream about doing wonderful things just so I could make life easier for them. Instead I was making it worse." The dream of helping his parents seems to have been the motivation that drove Poitier to a daring move a bus trip to New York City, where he arrived with $1.50 and the certainty that "something would happen to me, maybe good, maybe bad but something would happen." he recalls, "from a "I was a society, 14 and alone, thrust into the greatest city of them all. At first I must have been too ignorant to be scared, but then I learned what scared means." He worked at menial jobs, slept on slum roof- semi-illiterate- ," semi-primiti- ve 6 Family Weekly, March 29, 1964 Poittiei well-educat- ed amr, TKoofor 4T nnrao in In h Q theater world," he muses, "in quest of some corner where I could lay my weary head down." At an audition, the school faculty heard a few lines of Poitier's West Indian dialect and ordered him out of the theater. Still determined, Sidney bought a $14 radio and spent hours listening to announcers and imitating their inflections. Not knowing plays were available to study, he acted out scenes from confession magazines. Months later he auditioned again reading a "confession" story in tones of a radio commercial. This time he was allowed to stay. "They needed male players," says Poitier. Others claim Poitier's handsomeness and mellifluous voice were I tUis 'Lilies of the Field" may win Poitier an Oscar. Is He a "Driven Mam"? This Oscar candidate has enjoyed unparalleled success, yet it has never fulfilled his needs; now he feels death may have brought him with life face-to-fa- ce By JACK RYAN tops, and hid in a world of fantasy. He could for hours pluck chickens at the Waldorf-Astori- a while in his imagination he lived great adven- tures that climaxed in his return to Nassau to rescue his family from illness and hovel living. "Even a boy learns to live with fear and teasing and thinking he's a nothing," Poitier says. "But nobody learns to live with loneliness. At night I would cry out for my mother to come and A wnniiu n XJ the deciding factors. While other students aimed for top parts, Poitier strove to understudy the school's mpst promising pupil, Harry Belafonte. "I knew Harry would miss some performances while on singing engagements, and I'd get a chance to be seen." The scheme worked. A producer spotted Poitier during one of Belafonte's absences and launched a career that has moved steadily upward. lthough success allowed Poitier to change jfX fantasy into reality (he made his parents A comfortable in their last years and educated himself), it never really fulfilled him. There were too many self doubts to blot out; too much ridicule to drown. Yet Poitier, who speaks alternately in rococo rhetoric and hipster talk, feels death has with life at last. brought him "That jazz," he says, "that's past. A man should only do what is wjthin his innate capabilities, not dissipate himself in efforts whose sole goal is to gratify ego. Why should he try to prove things that no longer need proving?" Poitier lives in an English-styl- e country home in Pleasantville, N. Y. His wife, Juanita, is a d former dancer (gossip columnists say the marriage is shaky), and they have four daughters, ages 2l2 to 12. "When I think of what I must do now," he says, "I find myself asking only: how can I raise my girls to become the kind of people who contribute to this world, who give and not just take? That's what I want now outside of acting." He says it, as he says most things, with an intensity that belies the demise of the driven man. The driven man still exists. He maylsimply have found more important wants to satisfy. -- face-to-fa- writing-producing-directi- college-educate- ce ng |