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How 'Green Book' And The Hollywood Machine Swallowed Donald Shirley Whole
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How 'Green Book' And The Hollywood Machine Swallowed Donald Shirley Whole
December 14th 2018
In August 2018, Edwin Shirley III sat in disbelief as he watched a screening of Peter Farrelly’s new movie Green Book, a simplistic racial harmony story set in the Jim Crow south. Viggo Mortenson stars as Tony “Lip” Vallelonga, a racist Italian American New Yorker. Mahershala Ali is the supporting actor who is tapped to play Dr. Donald Waldridge Shirley, a Black, queer, musical genius—and Edwin’s uncle—who died at 86 in 2013.
As is typical of a Hollywood White Savior Film, Green Book places Dr. Shirley in several dangerous circumstances with racist white men so that Vallelonga can swoop in and save the day. In the process, Vallelonga teaches the world-renowned Black pianist about Black music and how to eat fried chicken.
Though Dr. Shirley did hire Vallelonga as a driver and bodyguard during one of Dr. Shirley’s concert tours in the south, much of the rest of the movie’s plot (co-written by Vallelonga’s son Nick Vallelonga) is disputed by more family members of Dr. Shirley than just Edwin—none of whom were consulted or even contacted at any point during the writing or production of this film.
A “symphony of lies”
“It was rather jarring,” Edwin shared with Shadow and Act of his first experience seeing this on-screen portrayal of his uncle as a Black man who is estranged from his family, estranged from the Black community and seemingly embarrassed by Blackness.
Never mind that Dr. Shirley was active in the civil rights movement, friends with Dr. King, present for the march in Selma, and close friends with Black musicians—from Nina Simone to Duke Ellington and Sarah Vaughn—Dr. Shirley was also very much a part of his family’s lives.
To see him portrayed otherwise, “That was very hurtful,” Edwin said. “That’s just 100% wrong.”
Dr. Shirley’s last living brother, Dr. Maurice Shirley, 82, was “furious” when he heard of the depiction of his brother in this film and had much harsher criticism of it, calling it “a symphony of lies.” As one example, Maurice mentioned the moment in the film where Ali’s character says he has a brother but didn’t know his whereabouts, as they hadn’t been in contact for some time.
“At that point [in 1962 when the events of the film supposedly take place], he had three living brothers with whom he was always in contact,” Maurice said, speaking of himself, and his and Dr. Shirley’s two older brothers, Dr. Edwin Shirley Jr. and Dr. Calvin Hilton Shirley.
“One of the things Donald used to remind me in his later years was he literally raised me,” Maurice said. Their mother died when Donald was 9 years old and Maurice was just two days old, so Dr. Shirley, as the closest brother in age to Maurice, took care of him growing up and remained close with him until Dr. Shirley’s death five years ago.
“There wasn’t a month where I didn’t have a phone call conversation with Donald,” Maurice said.
The Uncle Donald that Edwin knew comforted him in his grief in 1964 when Edwin was just 15 years old and Edwin’s little brother had been struck and killed by a car. Dr. Shirley was on tour at the time and stopped everything to come down to Miami to be with the family at the funeral. It was there that Edwin became enthralled with what his Uncle Donald did for a living and Dr. Shirley took a special interest in him too.
“He asked my mother if she would allow me to ride with him on tour for a week, and much to my amazement, she allowed me to skip school for that week and a couple of days to ride with him,” he said. Thus began Edwin’s first adventure with his uncle as they embarked on Dr. Shirley’s nine-day concert tour from Cincinnati to Chicago.
“He was always instructing,” Edwin remembered from that trip. When Edwin shared with Dr. Shirley that he wanted to be a writer, Dr. Shirley said, "'If you want to be a writer, you need to read Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust.’ I will never forget that. He said, ‘This will make you focus on attention to detail. It’ll make you neurotic but it will make you a better writer,'” Edwin said.
Dr. Shirley's inclination to teach is one part of the film that Edwin doesn’t find “highly doubtful.”
“There was a scene in which he was correcting Tony and Tony asks, ‘Why are you busting my [balls]?’ And he said, ‘Because you can do better.’ That, to me, sounded just like him.”
Unfortunately, for the family, there is more wrong than there is right, including the crux of the film—that Green Book, as Universal's marketing materials advertise, is “inspired by a true friendship.”
“No,” Maurice and his wife Patricia Shirley said in a uniformed scoff when asked if Dr. Shirley and Vallelonga were ever close friends. “Not at all,” Patricia said.
Donald Shirley as best man at the wedding of Patricia Shirley and Maurice Shirley | Credit: Maurice and Patricia Shirley
Maurice and Patricia Shirley had met Vallelonga in his capacity as a driver on some of their trips from their home in Milwaukee to New York City to visit with Dr. Shirley and hear him play at Carnegie Hall.
“It was an employer-employee relationship,” Patricia observed on those occasions that Vallelonga drove them around town. Neither during that time nor any time after did Dr. Shirley ever mention Tony as a “friend,” according to both Edwin and the couple. Instead, a professional relationship was “the only kind of relationship that [Dr. Shirley] ever had with any of the people he worked with,” she said.
“He insisted that be the case,” Maurice continued.
“Including the cellist and the bassist [he worked with in the Don Shirley Trio],” Patricia said. “It was always a professional employer-employee relationship.”
Beyond that, Maurice added with laugh, “You asked what kind of relationship he had with Tony? He fired Tony! Which is consistent with the many firings he did with all of his chauffeurs over time.”
And some of the reasons why Maurice said Dr. Shirley fired Tony were featured in the film.
“Tony would not open the door, he would not take any bags, he would take his [chauffeur’s] cap off when Donald got out of the car, and several times Donald would find him with the cap off, and confronted him,” Maurice recalled.
“So when you hear that Tony had been with him for 18 months, I can assure you, no chauffeur lasted with my brother for 18 months. Anybody who knew my brother’s temper and had any experience with any of his other chauffeurs—the maximum was the one from right here in Milwaukee from the Urban League that lasted at least two months.”
Not even members of the Trio were safe. “He would terminate them on the spot,” Patricia said. “He was a very meticulous individual. If they were late,” she said,
“Or played a note incorrectly,” Maurice said. “You can call it impulsivity, but he was a perfectionist.”
It was, perhaps, that level of perfectionism and his steadfast protection of his brand that made Dr. Shirley refuse Nick Vallelonga’s initial request for permission to make a movie about him.
“I remember very, very clearly, going back 30 years, my uncle had been approached by Nick Vallelonga, the son of Tony Vallelonga, about a movie on his life, and Uncle Donald told me about it,” Edwin said. “He flatly refused.”
At first, Edwin tried to get Dr. Shirley to reconsider Nick’s offer. “I remember suggesting to him that it might be a good idea, ‘you can be involved [with the making of the film],’ and he just flatly said, ‘No, absolutely not. I don’t want to have any part of that.’” Edwin remembered.
“And so, I said to him at the time, ‘Well, perhaps you can set some conditions whereby you can be involved if they agree to certain things in terms of control for you,’ and what he said at the time was, ‘No matter what they say to me now, I will not have any control over how I am portrayed.’”
As the family’s insistence on the inaccuracies in Green Book shows, Dr. Shirley was right.
“God knows, this is the reason that he never wanted to have his life portrayed on screen,” Edwin said. “I now understand why, and I feel terrible that I was actually trying to urge him to do this in the 1980s, because everything that he objected to back then has come true now.”
============================================
On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Maurice and his niece Carol Shirley Kimble, both gave statements to NPR’s 1A radio show expressing their discontent with the film.
That same day, Maurice and Edwin both received phone calls from Ali.
“I got a call from Mahershala Ali, a very, very respectful phone call, from him personally. He called me and my Uncle Maurice in which he apologized profusely if there had been any offense,” said Edwin. “What he said was, ‘If I have offended you, I am so, so terribly sorry. I did the best I could with the material I had. I was not aware that there were close relatives with whom I could have consulted to add some nuance to the character.’”
Ali did not offer a statement to Shadow And Act for this story.
How 'Green Book' And The Hollywood Machine Swallowed Donald Shirley Whole
Features Interviews News Video Film
How 'Green Book' And The Hollywood Machine Swallowed Donald Shirley Whole
December 14th 2018
In August 2018, Edwin Shirley III sat in disbelief as he watched a screening of Peter Farrelly’s new movie Green Book, a simplistic racial harmony story set in the Jim Crow south. Viggo Mortenson stars as Tony “Lip” Vallelonga, a racist Italian American New Yorker. Mahershala Ali is the supporting actor who is tapped to play Dr. Donald Waldridge Shirley, a Black, queer, musical genius—and Edwin’s uncle—who died at 86 in 2013.
As is typical of a Hollywood White Savior Film, Green Book places Dr. Shirley in several dangerous circumstances with racist white men so that Vallelonga can swoop in and save the day. In the process, Vallelonga teaches the world-renowned Black pianist about Black music and how to eat fried chicken.
Though Dr. Shirley did hire Vallelonga as a driver and bodyguard during one of Dr. Shirley’s concert tours in the south, much of the rest of the movie’s plot (co-written by Vallelonga’s son Nick Vallelonga) is disputed by more family members of Dr. Shirley than just Edwin—none of whom were consulted or even contacted at any point during the writing or production of this film.
A “symphony of lies”
“It was rather jarring,” Edwin shared with Shadow and Act of his first experience seeing this on-screen portrayal of his uncle as a Black man who is estranged from his family, estranged from the Black community and seemingly embarrassed by Blackness.
Never mind that Dr. Shirley was active in the civil rights movement, friends with Dr. King, present for the march in Selma, and close friends with Black musicians—from Nina Simone to Duke Ellington and Sarah Vaughn—Dr. Shirley was also very much a part of his family’s lives.
To see him portrayed otherwise, “That was very hurtful,” Edwin said. “That’s just 100% wrong.”
Dr. Shirley’s last living brother, Dr. Maurice Shirley, 82, was “furious” when he heard of the depiction of his brother in this film and had much harsher criticism of it, calling it “a symphony of lies.” As one example, Maurice mentioned the moment in the film where Ali’s character says he has a brother but didn’t know his whereabouts, as they hadn’t been in contact for some time.
“At that point [in 1962 when the events of the film supposedly take place], he had three living brothers with whom he was always in contact,” Maurice said, speaking of himself, and his and Dr. Shirley’s two older brothers, Dr. Edwin Shirley Jr. and Dr. Calvin Hilton Shirley.
“One of the things Donald used to remind me in his later years was he literally raised me,” Maurice said. Their mother died when Donald was 9 years old and Maurice was just two days old, so Dr. Shirley, as the closest brother in age to Maurice, took care of him growing up and remained close with him until Dr. Shirley’s death five years ago.
“There wasn’t a month where I didn’t have a phone call conversation with Donald,” Maurice said.
The Uncle Donald that Edwin knew comforted him in his grief in 1964 when Edwin was just 15 years old and Edwin’s little brother had been struck and killed by a car. Dr. Shirley was on tour at the time and stopped everything to come down to Miami to be with the family at the funeral. It was there that Edwin became enthralled with what his Uncle Donald did for a living and Dr. Shirley took a special interest in him too.
“He asked my mother if she would allow me to ride with him on tour for a week, and much to my amazement, she allowed me to skip school for that week and a couple of days to ride with him,” he said. Thus began Edwin’s first adventure with his uncle as they embarked on Dr. Shirley’s nine-day concert tour from Cincinnati to Chicago.
“He was always instructing,” Edwin remembered from that trip. When Edwin shared with Dr. Shirley that he wanted to be a writer, Dr. Shirley said, "'If you want to be a writer, you need to read Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust.’ I will never forget that. He said, ‘This will make you focus on attention to detail. It’ll make you neurotic but it will make you a better writer,'” Edwin said.
Dr. Shirley's inclination to teach is one part of the film that Edwin doesn’t find “highly doubtful.”
“There was a scene in which he was correcting Tony and Tony asks, ‘Why are you busting my [balls]?’ And he said, ‘Because you can do better.’ That, to me, sounded just like him.”
Unfortunately, for the family, there is more wrong than there is right, including the crux of the film—that Green Book, as Universal's marketing materials advertise, is “inspired by a true friendship.”
“No,” Maurice and his wife Patricia Shirley said in a uniformed scoff when asked if Dr. Shirley and Vallelonga were ever close friends. “Not at all,” Patricia said.
Maurice and Patricia Shirley had met Vallelonga in his capacity as a driver on some of their trips from their home in Milwaukee to New York City to visit with Dr. Shirley and hear him play at Carnegie Hall.
“It was an employer-employee relationship,” Patricia observed on those occasions that Vallelonga drove them around town. Neither during that time nor any time after did Dr. Shirley ever mention Tony as a “friend,” according to both Edwin and the couple. Instead, a professional relationship was “the only kind of relationship that [Dr. Shirley] ever had with any of the people he worked with,” she said.
“He insisted that be the case,” Maurice continued.
“Including the cellist and the bassist [he worked with in the Don Shirley Trio],” Patricia said. “It was always a professional employer-employee relationship.”
Beyond that, Maurice added with laugh, “You asked what kind of relationship he had with Tony? He fired Tony! Which is consistent with the many firings he did with all of his chauffeurs over time.”
And some of the reasons why Maurice said Dr. Shirley fired Tony were featured in the film.
“Tony would not open the door, he would not take any bags, he would take his [chauffeur’s] cap off when Donald got out of the car, and several times Donald would find him with the cap off, and confronted him,” Maurice recalled.
“So when you hear that Tony had been with him for 18 months, I can assure you, no chauffeur lasted with my brother for 18 months. Anybody who knew my brother’s temper and had any experience with any of his other chauffeurs—the maximum was the one from right here in Milwaukee from the Urban League that lasted at least two months.”
Not even members of the Trio were safe. “He would terminate them on the spot,” Patricia said. “He was a very meticulous individual. If they were late,” she said,
“Or played a note incorrectly,” Maurice said. “You can call it impulsivity, but he was a perfectionist.”
It was, perhaps, that level of perfectionism and his steadfast protection of his brand that made Dr. Shirley refuse Nick Vallelonga’s initial request for permission to make a movie about him.
“I remember very, very clearly, going back 30 years, my uncle had been approached by Nick Vallelonga, the son of Tony Vallelonga, about a movie on his life, and Uncle Donald told me about it,” Edwin said. “He flatly refused.”
At first, Edwin tried to get Dr. Shirley to reconsider Nick’s offer. “I remember suggesting to him that it might be a good idea, ‘you can be involved [with the making of the film],’ and he just flatly said, ‘No, absolutely not. I don’t want to have any part of that.’” Edwin remembered.
“And so, I said to him at the time, ‘Well, perhaps you can set some conditions whereby you can be involved if they agree to certain things in terms of control for you,’ and what he said at the time was, ‘No matter what they say to me now, I will not have any control over how I am portrayed.’”
As the family’s insistence on the inaccuracies in Green Book shows, Dr. Shirley was right.
“God knows, this is the reason that he never wanted to have his life portrayed on screen,” Edwin said. “I now understand why, and I feel terrible that I was actually trying to urge him to do this in the 1980s, because everything that he objected to back then has come true now.”
============================================
On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Maurice and his niece Carol Shirley Kimble, both gave statements to NPR’s 1A radio show expressing their discontent with the film.
That same day, Maurice and Edwin both received phone calls from Ali.
“I got a call from Mahershala Ali, a very, very respectful phone call, from him personally. He called me and my Uncle Maurice in which he apologized profusely if there had been any offense,” said Edwin. “What he said was, ‘If I have offended you, I am so, so terribly sorry. I did the best I could with the material I had. I was not aware that there were close relatives with whom I could have consulted to add some nuance to the character.’”
Ali did not offer a statement to Shadow And Act for this story.
