As he was casting, Preminger scheduled a rehearsal period beginning on June 3 and planned to start shooting on June 24. But well into April two
Dorothy Dandridge in a cameo appearance as herself, a sophisticated nightclub singer, in Remains to Be Seen, a year before Carmen Jones.
principal roles remained unfilled: Joe’s small-town gal Cindy Lou, and the star-making title role. In retrospect Otto’s casting of Dorothy Dandridge, a striking beauty and a performer with a lengthy résumé, would seem to have been a foregone conclusion. Born in 1923, Dandridge had been working professionally since the age of four. She appeared regularly in nightclubs, was on television in Beulah, and had had occasional roles in movies, beginning with a bit part in the Marx Brothers’ A Day at the Races in 1937. Typecast as an “exotic,” she had been seen in such minor films as Bahama Passage (1941), Drums of the Congo (1942), and Tarzan and the Jungle Queen (1951). However, in 1953 her appearance as a high school teacher in Bright Road had given her a new stature in the film community, and her career as a sultry chanteuse was flourishing. Preminger certainly knew about her; he had even seen her in a nightclub appearance in New York. But he thought she was too self-contained to play Carmen. He was looking for an actress with a drop-dead, come-hither sex appeal he did not feel Dandridge projected. Dan-dridge’s agents at MCA, who also thought she was the wrong type, were promoting another client, Joyce Bryant. But Dorothy wanted the role and was determined to get it.
Preminger agreed to see her only because of the intervention of his brother, Ingo, whose office at 214 South Beverly Drive was located in the same building where Dorothy’s personal manager, Earl Mills, also had an office. Mills showed Ingo a file of Dandridge’s photos and clippings and pleaded with him to get his client an interview. Ingo spoke to his brother, but when Otto called Mills to arrange a meeting he stated frankly that he didn’t think Dandridge was Carmen. “She’s too much like Loretta Young,” he told Mills.11
When Earl Mills and his anxious client arrived for the interview, Dorothy was too beautifully dressed, almost as if she had been compelled to confirm Preminger’s preconception of her. Perhaps being a little wicked, Otto suggested right off that she audition for the role of Cindy Lou, “a sweet, yielding girl,”12 which in fact is how he saw Dorothy. He wanted to give her the script, have her study the part of Cindy Lou, and then come back to audition. As Dandridge recalled, Otto was quite definite. “You cannot act the Carmen role. You have a veneer, my dear. You look the sophisticate. When I saw you I thought, How lovely, a model, a beautiful butterfly … but not Carmen, my dear.”13
Dorothy exploded. “Mr. Preminger, I’m an actress. I can play a whore as well as I can play a nun. If I could only convince you. I’m not a Cindy Lou. You don’t know what I’ve gone through.” Mills, sensing that Preminger liked Dorothy and “even wanted to help her,” silenced his client.14 He grabbed the script Otto was offering because he knew this would give them the chance for a second meeting.
Mills and Dorothy resolved to play their second act with Otto Preminger in a different key. At Max Factor’s, Dorothy and her manager borrowed a “messy looking black wig,” “an off-the-shoulder low cut black peasant blouse without a bra,” “a black satin skirt with a slit to the thigh without a girdle,” and “black high-heeled pumps.”15 Then Dorothy applied “sexy” makeup and began to practice a hip-swaying walk. To top off her impersonation Dorothy thought she needed “a tired look as if I had worn out a bed. I went to the gym and deliberately tired myself before I went to
For her Carmen Jones screen test, Dandridge trans-formed herself from a ladylike chanteuse into Bizet’s rough-and-ready siren.
the audition.”16 As Mills commented, “She felt she might not get the role of Carmen but she was sure as hell certain that she wouldn’t be asked to do the role of Cindy.”17
When for the second time she and her manager entered Preminger’s office, by design just a shade late for their appointment, Dorothy with a provocative look in her “tired” eyes sashayed across the large room. “My God, it’s Carmen!” Preminger exclaimed, caught off guard by Dandridge’s transformation. “I had ceased to be the saloon singer, the lady, the sophisticate,” Dorothy exulted.18 Clearly delighted and no doubt realizing he had found his Carmen, Preminger asked her to move about the office, to open and close drawers, all the while gauging her gestures and body language on the sexual Richter scale. At the end of the meeting, he told her he wanted to shoot a screen test. To accommodate Dorothy’s nightclub schedule—she had a contract to appear at the Chase Hotel in St. Louis on May 3—he scheduled the test for mid-May When Dandridge was out of town, Otto found his Cindy Lou, Olga James, a Juilliard School of Music graduate with an operatic vocal range. “When I sang an aria for Preminger at the Alvin Theatre in New York, everybody applauded,” as James recalled. “It wasn’t a stretch for me. I was that character, a country-looking girl. I was just a little ingenue.”19
Dorothy’s test scene was the same one that Preminger had asked Diahann Carroll to perform. Playing opposite James Edwards, Dandridge gave a riveting performance, sexy and fearless. Preminger, who had already shot tests of Joyce Bryant and Elizabeth Foster in the same scene, was convinced, and on May 21 he announced that Dorothy Dandridge would play Carmen Jones.
At first Dorothy was exhilarated by having won the showiest leading role ever offered to a black performer in an American film. But a few days later she began to feel she wouldn’t be able to play it. “Too much stress. I feared my emotional system couldn’t handle it,” she recalled.20 Despite her veneer, Dorothy Dandridge was deeply troubled. She had had numerous affairs, often with white men who she felt had betrayed her, and she was guilt-stricken about her daughter, brain-damaged from birth. Eager to be taken seriously as an actress and frustrated by the kinds of roles she was offered, in the late 1940s she had studied at the Actors Lab, run by veterans of the 1930s Group Theatre. “The studios often sent young players to us, but Dorothy came on her own,” recalled Phoebe Brand, a Group actress who taught at the Lab.
She was very serious about acting. We taught Stanislavski, and unlike Marilyn Monroe, who also studied with us at the time and did not understand me, Dorothy absorbed our approach quickly. Morrie [Morris Carnovsky Brand’s husband] cast Dorothy as Kukachin in our production of O’Neill’s Marco Millions, and she was marvelous—we would have cast her in that role on Broadway. Dorothy was beautiful, startlingly so, but very fragile. She was a loner who didn’t make chums and was not easy to know. I remember once that she brought in her daughter; she carried her in. It was clear that she was crazy about her, but that she also felt so sorry and responsible for the child’s illness. There weren’t many blacks studying with us, though I wished there had been, but at that time the studios were not using black actors. We were surprised when she was cast as Carmen: who would have thought of casting her that way?21
Now, at thirty-one, not young by Hollywood standards, Dorothy had been handed the chance to act that she had long wished for, and she was panic-stricken. Her anxiety grew when a number of black friends cautioned her against playing a part that could reinforce negative preconceptions. “The Negro community is plagued by fears of its image,” Dorothy observed. “It has been so much the victim of stereotypes that it has developed an understandable sensitivity. I couldn’t bear to think I might turn in a performance that would be injurious to that perennial spectre, race pride, the group dignity”22 After several agonizing days in seclusion, she delegated Earl Mills to inform Preminger that he would have to continue his search for Carmen.
As soon as he heard, Otto drove over to Dorothy’s apartment on the Sunset Strip. He assured her, as Dorothy recalled, that she was indeed “a good actress … uninhibited, [with] natural free motions. By the middle of the evening I called him Otto.” By the end of the evening, Dorothy not only agreed to play Carmen, she “became [Otto’s] girl.”23 Dorothy’s biographer Donald Bogle was not certain that the affair began “at the beginning, as Dorothy claimed—yo
u can’t trust everything in Dandridge’s autobiography. But it certainly started during the filming.”24
“Black women fascinated Otto,” as Willi Frischauer reported,25 while Dorothy had a decided preference for Caucasian men. For Otto, Dorothy personified a sexual ideal, the incarnation of his enduring, fetishistic devotion to black women. For Dorothy, Otto “was physical, all male—no problem there.” Aside from mutual racial and sexual attraction, however, there was much that would have drawn them together. Dorothy was enticed by Otto’s cultivated background and found his paternalistic attitude toward her wonderfully comforting. Her own father had abandoned her and her sister Vivian and she despised her mother, Ruby, an actress whose sadistic lesbian lover regularly beat both young women. Otto’s complexity, his combination of “both hardness and sensitivity,” also appealed to her.26 To Otto, the young woman’s vulnerability was as magnetic as her beauty. He knew he could draw a powerful Carmen from her, in the process transforming a damaged bronze Venus into a bona fide movie star, the first dark-skinned female star in Hollywood history. But he also sensed he would be able to exert control over her private life.
Beginning an affair with his star violated Preminger’s strict policy of separating church and state, but he succumbed this one time because his attraction to Dorothy was oceanic. “There was no doubt that he cared enormously about her,” Donald Bogle said. “Just as there was no doubt that Dorothy cared deeply for him. They were in love; on both sides, the feelings were overpowering. Both Otto and Dorothy, however, were concerned about race and the effect on their careers, and so there were no public or open displays, although there were rumors.”27 When they began their affair Preminger told Dorothy that he and Mary continued to live in the same house and cohosted parties but “were not exactly husband and wife.” “I think he had said we would be lovers ‘for the duration of the picture,’ but if so I ignored it,” as Dorothy recalled.28
As the last cast member to be signed, Dorothy had little time to collect herself. Music recording sessions in which she and Harry Belafonte were to be dubbed, respectively, by Marilyn Horne and La Verne Hutchinson, were scheduled for June I. (Neither Dandridge nor Belafonte could sing in the operatic range the score required.) Following three weeks of intensive rehearsals, shooting was now scheduled to begin June 30. “Otto knew he was dealing with people who had not been well treated by the industry, and he was fatherly and respectful,” recalled his stepson Sandy, hired to work on the film. (At the time Sandy did not know of Otto’s affair with Dorothy.) “Pearlie May [Pearl Bailey], respected by everybody, would joke and keep it light, and that also helped to take the heat off. She joked with Otto, who was just crazy about her. She was a doll.”29 “Preminger treated people like
On the Carmen Jones set with Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, and visitor Robert Mitchum. The rapport between Otto and Dorothy is apparent.
professionals,” Olga James maintained. “He rode a few people, yes, but that had nothing at all to do with race. There was no kind of fake camaraderie, or any kind of condescension whatsoever.”30
Preminger proceeded at a breakneck pace. Working from early morning until late at night, he put in longer hours than anyone else. Although still living with Mary and Sandy in Malibu, he spent some evenings at Dorothy’s apartment. The demands of a highly compressed shoot that moved between exterior locations in El Monte, California, doubling for the Southern locales, and interiors, including “Chicago,” filmed at the Culver Studios in Culver City, took their toll on the filmmaker, and perhaps inevitably he exploded a few times. The first episode occurred with a tense Brock Peters, “the new kid on the block,” who felt other cast members were “more sophisticated and experienced” than he was. “In one scene, Otto wasn’t getting what he wanted from me and he began to pressure me,” Peters recalled.
He was haranguing me, “You’re a New York actor, I expect better,” in front of everybody, in this terribly competitive environment. I was already insecure, and I thought his comment meant that somebody in Los Angeles should be playing my part. I was angry, and I lost it. I moved in on him. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but Pearl and somebody else held me back. Pearl said, “Hold your temper, or you will never work again.” I subsided quickly. We got past that, but then I was worried I’d be fired. A little later on—Otto was an equal opportunity haranguer—he went after Olga James, a glorious singer. The orchestra was assembled and she was to record her aria. He wanted Sprechgesang— he wanted it to sound more like speaking and less operatic, and when Olga didn’t immediately do what he felt he had clearly explained, he began to say terrible things to her out in the open. He just began to berate her in front of the full orchestra and all the singers; it was uncomfortable for everybody, and he didn’t seem to care or to notice.31
Olga James, as she remembered,
shouted back. “Don’t you yell at me,” I said. “How dare you?” When he lost his temper with me a second time, I snapped back at him again. He wanted to get a shot on location before he lost the light, and when I wasn’t quite ready he started in. But he was right and I was wrong: a professional would have understood about getting the light. He took charge, as he had every right to. “This is my picture,” he told me. Most of the time, however, Otto really was charming to all of us. Many people were afraid of him, though, and I noticed that he appreciated the ones who were not. In one rehearsal I remember Preminger saying with a big smile to Diahann Carroll, “You’re not intimidated by me at all, are you?” She wasn’t, and he enjoyed that.32
Vague rumors of an affair between Otto and Dorothy were floated within the cast (“I didn’t believe it when someone hinted about it,” Brock Peters said).33 But on the set the relationship remained strictly professional. “Preminger treated Dorothy very, very carefully, we all saw that, but once he did say something that made her cry,” Olga James recollected. “She went to her dressing room and cried like a lady”34 Working under enormous pressure—she had to awake each morning at five, and was on call for almost every scene—Dorothy kept to herself. By nature she was reclusive and untrusting, and relations between her and the other performers remained distant. “Harry was much more accessible,” Brock Peters said. “At first, Dorothy was extremely unfriendly to me, and I wondered if she thought I was a bad actor. I could see she was having a hard time, though, and that she was terribly insecure.”35
Dorothy’s retreats were also prompted by tensions with Pearl Bailey. “It was obvious to all of us that Pearl was jealous of Dorothy,” James said. “Most of us were theater trained, including Pearl, and Dorothy was from a different tradition. She was a very fine actress for film—she let the camera come to her. But Pearl didn’t think Dorothy was a good actress or singer. I don’t want to say anything disparaging about Pearl, however, who was a wonderful performer of a particular kind. White people loved her.”36 According to Donald Bogle, Bailey was “a pill, a holy terror like Ethel Waters and Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson. She was very competitive, and very jealous. She thought she should have played Carmen, as later she thought she should have played Bess [in Porgy and Bess].”37
After completing principal photography at the beginning of August, Preminger and the Fox publicity department gave Dorothy an all-out star buildup. Otto arranged for Philippe Halsman to photograph Dorothy for an article in Ebony magazine entitled “The Five Most Beautiful Negro Women in the World” (the others were Lena Horne, Hilda Simms, Eartha Kitt, and Joyce Bryant). He booked Dorothy, dressed in a Carmen costume of red skirt and black blouse, to sing two songs on October 24 on a live television spectacular, “Light’s Diamond Jubilee,” produced by David O. Selznick. On October 25, dressed in the same Carmen costume, she
Preminger and Pearl Bailey, one of his favorite actresses, on the set of Carmen Jones.
appeared on the cover of Life, again photographed by Philippe Halsman. To attend the world premiere at the Rivoli Theatre on October 28, Dorothy flew East with her sister Vivian. On opening night the klieg lights illumin
ating the sky were red, a tribute to the burning rose shimmering in fire, which was the image Preminger and Saul Bass had designed as the film’s logo. When Dorothy, alone, stepped out of a limousine to a barrage of flashing lightbulbs, she smiled radiantly. “If ever Dorothy looked happy, it was this night,” Donald Bogle noted.38
Her reviews were sensational. “She comes close to the edge of greatness,” Archer Winsten proclaimed in the New York Post. “Incandescent,” Newsweek hailed. According to Time, “she holds the eye—like a match burning steadily in a tornado.” “Dorothy Dandridge lights a blazing bonfire on the screen,” wrote Otis Guernsey in the New York Herald Tribune. Hedda Hopper raved that she “got so excited she burned a big hole in the front of [her] dress. Yes, the film is that hot.”39
Creating a sizzling Carmen in collaboration with his lover, a frightened actress, Preminger achieved one of the triumphs of his career, and over fifty years later Dorothy’s performance remains vibrant, and beyond either stereotype or vulgarity. For the first time in a mainstream American film Preminger had revealed a black woman’s potent sexuality. And in 1954 the erotic force that he helped Dorothy to unleash gave the film a tingle of danger, a shivering, “forbidden” undertow. Dorothy’s Carmen, sexually restless, forever on the prowl and forever dissatisfied, knows and controls her value in the sexual marketplace. She’s cunning in her ability to manipulate male desire, but unlike a man (Otto Preminger, for instance), for whom sexual conquest is a natural right, a way of seizing and maintaining power, Carmen is doomed: she’s too sexy to live. Drawing on his intimate knowledge of her, Preminger directed Dorothy to line Carmen’s sensuality with an underlying melancholy, and her performance is infused with the actress’s own wounds, her history as a black woman both rewarded and bruised, lionized and punished, for her beauty.
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