Self-Made, the new Netflix miniseries about pioneering haircare entrepreneur Madam C.J. Walker, occasionally shifts its focus to Walker’s daughter, A’lelia Walker. Played by Tiffany Haddish, A’lelia (who was born Lelia, but later changed her name) is the heir apparent to the groundbreaking business that her mother painstakingly built into a historic company, making Madam C.J. the first black woman to become a self-made millionaire in American history.
The series, directed by Kasi Lemmons, offers glimpses of A’lelia’s life, portraying her as an unhappily married woman who is secretly queer—and falling for another woman in her mother’s circle. The show also paints A’lelia as a burgeoning party girl, a socialite who becomes fond of using her wealth to hold flashy art parties as the country rolls into the Roaring Twenties. But how closely does the show skew to the real story of A’lelia Walker?
As it turns out, it’s a somewhat accurate if thin portrait of A’lelia, largely because her mother (played by Octavia Spencer) is the real focus of the story. In real life, A’lelia actually was a lively, influential socialite who fluttered around New York in the 1920s and was a patron of the arts, supporting queer artists during the Harlem Renaissance.
These weren’t just any old parties, though. These were lavish, days-long events that she would throw either at Villa Lewaro, her mother’s estate in Irvington, New York (the villa was named after her, Leila Walker Robinson: Le-Wa-Ro), or at the Dark Tower, the nickname for her spacious Harlem home that had more than 30 rooms. Artists like queer jazz singer Alberta Hunter, cabaret performer Jimmy Daniels, and poet Langston Hughes, a close friend who would nickname A’lelia the “joy goddess of Harlem,” would often attend these gatherings.
“She would usually issue several hundred invitations to each party,” Hughes wrote in his autobiography The Big Sea. “Unless you went early there was no possible way of getting in. Her parties were as crowded as the New York subway at the rush hour—entrance, lobby, stops, hallway and apartment a milling crush of guests, with everybody seeming to enjoy the crowding.”
Self-Made hints at A’lelia’s rising status as a Olympic-level party-giver, but stops short show of exploring this time in her life. It glosses over exciting escapades like her four-month trip to Paris, Nice, Monte Carlo, Naples, Rome, Cairo, Jerusalem, Djibouti, Addis Ababa and London—which she embarked upon according to an essay by her great-granddaughter A’lelia Bundles, who wrote the eponymous book Self-Made is based on.
However, the show does lean deeply into the assumption that A’lelia is queer, which may not be wholly accurate. A’lelia married three times over the course of her life, first to John Robinson (played by J. Alphonse Nicholson in the series). Per NPR, A’lelia wasn’t known to identify as a lesbian or bisexual, though she did throw events that fostered Harlem’s queer community. In a 1983 taped interview, lesbian activist Mabel Hampton recalled what it was like attending one of A’lelia’s parties with a girlfriend.
“There was men and women, women and women, and men and men…we had a lovely time, [and] stayed all night ‘til 3 or 4 the next day,” she said, noting that in one room at a party she attended, people walked around completely nude. “Everyone did whatever they wanted to do. They wanted to make love, they made love….oh, it was marvelous.”
Though A’lelia didn’t have the same level of business prowess as her mother, she ran the Madame C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company until her death in 1931. “That was really the end of the gay times of the New Negro era in Harlem,” Hughes wrote of her passing. However, he also noted in The Big Sea that her funeral at Villa Lewaro, which included eulogies by civil rights icons like Mary McLeod Bethune, was “very much like a party” with “hundreds of friends outside, waving their white, engraved invitations aloft in the vain hope of entering.” Just like in life.
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