Film & TV

On the 10th anniversary of his passing, Donald Shirley’s depiction in ‘Green Book’ remains a questionable footnote

Not everyone’s would-be Oscar darling ages gracefully.

DESCRIBE THE IMAGE FOR ACCESSIBILITY, EXAMPLE: Photo of a chef putting red sauce onto an omelette.
"His virtuosity is worthy of Gods," Russian composer Igor Stravinsky once said about Donald Shirley. (Photo courtesy of Audio Fidelity)

The gifted pianist and composer Donald Shirley lived alone above Carnegie Hall for more than 50 years. What did that look like, deciding what would furnish the shelves and 34-foot-high walls of his flat? Shirley was also the gifted painter behind the cover of his 1956 record, “Orpheus in the Underworld.” At what hours of the day would he paint? Did Shirley ever sit alone by those lofty windows and look down on New York with the stillness of Lee Kang-sheng in a Ming-liang Tsai film when he couldn’t sleep? Or did his neighbor Marlon Brando and other LGBTQ+ icons in the building join him? How did Shirley wear the raw wounds of heartbreak? Stoically, or proudly on his sleeve as his way of telling the world: I have loved once before and never again?

Those are the questions that went unanswered in Peter Farrelly’s “Green Book.” When Shirley died 10 years ago today at 86, he had long left the public eye. Then “Green Book” thrust Shirley back into the spotlight in 2019 when the film was honored with Best Picture at the 91st Academy Awards — to the dismay of those in and out of the Black community who had raised red flags about this telling, including Spike Lee, who attempted to leave before the speeches concluded. Lee’s “Do The Right Thing” didn’t get the Best Picture nomination in 1990, but “Driving Miss Daisy” did — and it won.

“Green Book,” named after a travel guide that listed safe places to eat and sleep for traveling African Americans during Jim Crow America, follows a racist Copacabana club bouncer, an Italian American from the Bronx named Frank “Tony Lip” Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen), who’s hired to drive world-class Jamaican American pianist Donald Shirley (Mahershala Ali) through the South for a series of concerts that span two months in 1962.

Much of the basis for the story came from Lip’s recollection and a few tapes. While “inspired by a true friendship” is far from historical accuracy, as audience members, we have to question the integrity of a story about race filtered through the gaze of a proud, grade-A “bullshit artist” and racist. But even in cinema, the racist gets top billing.

Nothing is more disappointing than this outdated exploit with its storybook ending, sanitized ideas of racism in the Jim Crow era, and surface-level condemnation that would’ve weathered the awards circuit in the 1990s, but shouldn’t have done so in 2019. If something like this is validated by the Academy, it only justifies the cyclical production of these films that can’t look past the illusion of unity with any real finesse.

Don Shirley album cover for "Orpheus in the Underworld."
The opera "Orpheus in the Underworld" is a satirical spin on the tragic myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. (Photo courtesy of Cadence Records)

Farrelly, cautious of both the white and Black savior tropes, told Newsweek magazine: “We were careful not to make this film either of those.” So he made the film about both — Lip as Shirley’s literal lifesaver as the pianist’s driver (and, for some reason, the man who schools Shirley — who worked closely with Duke Ellington, but apparently never heard Aretha Franklin sing — on Black artists of the day), and Shirley the sole person responsible for changing Lip’s ways. But why is it that Shirley was tasked with solving prejudice that he didn’t create, just as countless Black historical figures, activists and characters in cinema have had to do?

The brilliant essayist and poet Hanif Abdurraqib argues that these films rarely take the most honest and simple approach to their themes: racism is about power, and in order to quell racism, it involves one’s willingness to give up that power. “Green Book” had everything to do with the harnessing of this power. According to the Shirley family, the making of the film was kept from them until it wrapped. The pianist’s nephew, Edwin Shirley III, said his uncle “flatly refused” when he was approached by the Vallelongas about the film in the ‘80s. According to Edwin, Shirley also said: “No matter what they say to me now, I will not have any control over how I am portrayed.” At the premiere of the film, Nick Vallelonga, Lip’s son and “Green Book” co-writer, told Edwin that the Vallelongas got Shirley’s permission to make the film, but no proof exists.

In a letter to Black Enterprise magazine penned by Maurice Shirley, the pianist’s then only living brother, he addressed the alleged inaccuracies of the film, such as Shirley’s estrangement from his own family and the Black community, the color of the Cadillac that Shirley rode in the film, and Shirley and Lip’s supposed friendship. The latter has been contested with voice recordings published by Deadline Hollywood in which Shirley can be heard alluding otherwise. Edwin has also argued that Shirley never studied at the Leningrad Conservatory as a child, but his record label pushed that because it was more palatable than Shirley’s HBCU background, which the film avoids. In the book “A Rediscovered Trio” by Evelin Täht and Atro Mikkola, Don Shirley Trio cellist Juri Täht agrees with Edwin. Täht, born in Estonia, was also written as Russian in the film.

“[Juri] is quite upset at this fact, and hopefully he will not be remembered simply as a Russian member of the Don Shirley Trio because of the movie,” Evelyn writes. “[Juri] lost a lot in his life because of Stalin and the Russians, and making him one … there are no words to describe that level of injustice.”

In the end, the three screenwriters who accepted the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for “Green Book” were all white men who didn’t even have the courtesy to thank Victor Hugo Green, author of the travel guide, or Shirley in their acceptance speeches (since Shirley allegedly gave them his blessing). After all, would we know about Lip if Shirley hadn’t been who he was? The reverence for the film fueled the ongoing passiveness towards the silencing of Black voices, whether it’s voter suppression or educational disparities. The filmworkers involved, including Lip’s character in the film, are one and the same as Americans who insist on the consumption of and benefit from Black culture, talent and ideas without having anything to do with Black people. But all this didn’t matter because the film soothed Academy voters and America’s insecurities tied to its longstanding, troubling relationship with the Black community.

The pacing of movie logic can’t believably absolve a crass understanding of generational and institutional racism, nor can the film be something more when little can be truly understood of Shirley, the most enigmatic person in the film by far, as a man without the shepherding by white people.

When Lip writes a letter to his wife from the road, he brings up Shirley: “He’s like a genius, I think. When I look at him in the rearview mirror, I can tell he’s always thinking about stuff in his head. I guess that’s what geniuses do. But it don’t look fun to be that smart.” Lip also notes: “But sometimes I think he gets sad and that’s why he drinks too much.”

But why should the depths of Shirley’s intellect, despair or joy go only as far as Lip’s gaze? Even Shirley’s attraction to men (Shirley never came out himself, this was on Lip’s word and everyone ran with it) is only ever suggested in a sequence and immediately brushed off in the film — as if that detail was included to simply provoke. Yes, Ali shares almost the same screen time as his lead actor, Mortensen, but that doesn’t necessarily mean equality because we know Lip more intimately than we ever will Shirley. And I’d bet my bottom dollar that if this were told from the perspective of Shirley, we could all learn something new for a change.

Letter scene from "Green Book."
Viggo Mortensen as Frank "Tony Lip" Vallelonga (left) and Mahershala Ali as Donald Shirley in "Green Book." (Photo courtesy of Universal Studios)

Earlier this year, I picked up Hanif Abdurraqib’s “A Little Devil in America,” a masterful and poignant chronicle of Black performance. In one chapter, the author gives us an alternative to the Shirley interpretation in Farrelly’s film.

“I want a movie in which Don Shirley is driven but doesn’t feel the need to speak to the white driver,” Abdurraqib writes. “A movie in which we don’t even know the driver’s name, but we know what Don Shirley’s favorite flower is by the way he rolls down his window and cranes his neck toward a field when the car drives by.”

To me, this feels like a single cloud in a sea of blue. Abdurraqib makes us conscious of the mundane and transcendental moments that the pianist potentially embraced in between inventing his own sound. Thumbing through the pages of a magazine, laying flowers on the burial site of a loved one and then retreating to his solitude, going to the movies. I imagine that Barry Jenkins would offer his patience and tenderness for these moments, or the musicality of Shirley’s mannerisms and thoughts could manifest itself through Steve McQueen’s eloquence.

But tone deaf and uninspired studios, filmmakers and Academy voters would much rather celebrate the chicken banter between a musical genius and his white driver instead of giving the due to one Black man’s forgotten legacy, so as to monetize the satisfaction of a cut-and-dry solution for racism in America.

Josef Astor’s documentary, “Let It Shine: Don Shirley in His Own Words,” will likely be the definitive film of Shirley’s prime, as an aged Shirley recalls various moments in his life in the trailer. But the release date remains unknown. And it’s unlikely that Shirley will get an official biography anytime soon, but writers such as Abdurraqib give the reader every reason to value Shirley’s personhood, even as “Green Book” has minimized it.

“My favorite thing about Don Shirley is not that he was a genius who led a sometimes spectacular life,” Abdurraqib writes. “It is that in the moments in between, he likely led a life that was very normal. And that is spectacular too.”

Today marks a decade since Shirley died of heart disease. Perhaps the greatest account of his little bohemia in the sky is in the tapestry of emotions that form when Shirley plays his scales, true as the one before it, and more akin to this thing called life than any Hollywood cliché.

NOTE: The originally published version of this piece misspelled “Driving Miss Daisy.” It has since been corrected.