“Yeah,” Robeson said after a pause, “but how do you know he didn’t go to a poker game and say, ‘That goddamn Belafonte wrecked my car in his anger over the Rosenbergs,’ and then others heard it and passed it on?”
I admitted I couldn’t be sure.
“Anyway, if he did rat on you, do you think he’d tell you? And if he didn’t, why would you want to put it out there that he did?”
Robeson was right; I’d never know what had happened, not for sure. So I never confronted Dotts, and, as it turned out, I was never called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Perhaps I’d scared off Miss Scotti. Or perhaps she’d been on a freelance mission, seeing what fish she could catch on her own. With that strangely fancy hat and veil, who knew?
If Dotts did name names, he certainly didn’t help his career by doing it. From then until he died in 1986, Dotts Johnson had exactly one more role in a feature film—a forgotten thriller called The Grissom Gang in 1971—and a small one at that.
In the spring of 1954, with Almanac still playing to sellout crowds on Broadway, RCA rushed to capitalize on my success with my first long-playing album, titling it “Mark Twain” and Other Folk Favorites, highlighting the showstopper that had won me my Tony Award. Wielding my new clout, I told the label’s executives I wanted to try a new approach. Most of my singles had been saturated in lush orchestrations that I felt overwhelmed the songs. I knew that was the style of the times, but I wanted a more bare-bones accompaniment. I also wanted the songs to be more international, a real expression of what “folk music” meant to me. So I chose numbers that ranged from “Tol’ My Captain,” a chain-gang song popularized by Josh White, to a sixteenth-century British hunting song called “The Fox,” to a Caribbean song, “Kalenda Rock,” about the sometimes deadly tradition of stick fighting, during Carnival, that had originated in Africa. The whole album was so eclectic—and so un-formulaic—that it caught the fancy of critics and audiences alike. It didn’t go through the roof, but it did sell respectably, and that boded well. Two years later, when my next albums generated much bigger numbers, eager new fans would snatch up Mark Twain, too, and it would enjoy a whole new, even better, run.
Almanac brought another big dividend that spring—my first leading-man film role. Otto Preminger, the Austro-Hungarian-born Broadway and Hollywood director known as much for his hot temper and bald head as his films, came to hear me, and told me backstage afterward that he wanted me for the male lead in his film version of Carmen, which would be called Carmen Jones.
A decade before, Oscar Hammerstein II had done the hard work, updating Georges Bizet’s nineteenth-century French comic opera for Broadway with a World War II setting and an all-black cast. But Preminger was taking on a considerable challenge, too. In Hollywood, all-black-cast movies were viewed as sure money-losers, after a brief vogue for them in 1943 with Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather, both of which had earned praise but no profits. Preminger, one very scrappy guy, was raring to prove that wisdom wrong. He’d just taken on the Breen Office—Hollywood’s exercise in self-censorship—by distributing his risqué comedy The Moon Is Blue without a Breen seal of approval, and it was doing well at the box office anyway. Making money from a first all-black film was his next mission, he told me, and with a glint in his eye, he added that he was matching me up against the perfect co-star: Dorothy Dandridge.
Rehearsals began June 3, 1954, on the Twentieth Century–Fox lot. By then, Preminger had broken it to us that the Bizet family was taking a hard line on rights. We could use Hammerstein’s lyrics and the World War II setting, but nothing of Carmen’s operatic structure or score could be changed. The problem was that none of us had operatic ranges. So for the singing, Preminger informed us, Fox’s studio chief Darryl Zanuck insisted that all of us lip-synch our songs and have bona fide opera singers supply the voices. Marilyn Horne would do Dorothy’s part; a singer named LeVern Hutcherson would do mine.
I can see LeVern in my mind’s eye now, a strong, proud man with a beautiful voice. And I can see him as I found him, a decade or so later, at a late-night restaurant called Reuben’s, on the East Side, where I’d gone after a performance at the Copa to get one of their outrageously large sandwiches. Before taking a table, I went downstairs to the men’s room, and did a double-take when the men’s room attendant handed me a towel.
“LeVern?”
He nodded with a sheepish smile.
“How’s it going?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “Not well,” he said softly. “It hasn’t gone well.”
I felt awful about that. Not in a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I way, for in truth, I had gifts that I knew would keep me working, at least in some club or other, as long as I could sing. All LeVern had was his voice. Aside from a few opera buffs, no one knew his face or, for that matter, his name. But would a white opera singer have gone from Carmen in Hollywood to working in a washroom? Not likely. LeVern was a sad reminder that for too many black performers, destitution was no more than a few paychecks away.
The news about lip-synching appalled and embarrassed us, but we knew there was nothing Preminger could do about it. Only his sheer will and stubbornness had pushed Zanuck into doing the film at all—that, and agreeing to forfeit his pay if the film bombed. He really was leading with his heart on this one. Inspired, we threw ourselves into rehearsals with a zeal I’ve never seen in a cast before or since: not just Dorothy and me, but Pearl Bailey, Diahann Carroll, and the rest.
I was thrilled, of course, to be working with Dorothy Dandridge again. I was thrilled just to see her. I went to her Hollywood house to work on our scenes; we went out to dinner, came back to her place, and kissed passionately on the doorstep. But it went no further. She was ready for a new relationship, she said, but it would only be with a man who’d go the distance with her. I told her how empty my marriage had become—and it had. Love had left the room some time ago; mainly now I felt a sense of grim obligation to Marguerite, and heaps of guilt. If I left her, I’d be letting her down, abandoning Adrienne, proving Mrs. Byrd right in all the doubts she loved to voice about me. But since I was still married, my protestations to Dorothy fell a bit flat.
What I wanted from Dorothy was more than a quick fling—I really did adore her—but less, in truth, than full commitment. I couldn’t leave Marguerite, not right then, not when she’d announced, a few months back, that she was pregnant again. When I’d recovered from my shock at that news—and I was shocked—I’d thought: Good! Maybe a second child will pull us together as parents, if not as lovers. Maybe this perfect little family of four will be enough to curb my restlessness and dissatisfaction. I did wonder if Marguerite had gotten pregnant on purpose, but it seemed pointless to ask. If she had, she probably wouldn’t have admitted it. More likely, she hadn’t. Marguerite had a full-fledged career as a child psychologist; the last thing she needed was the added distraction of a second child. For a few months, I’d made myself believe that Marguerite’s pregnancy had pulled me into our marriage again. But by the time I went to L.A. to do Carmen Jones, I knew that wasn’t the case, and courted Dorothy with a not-very-clear conscience. All to no avail.
It was during one of these fruitless nights out that I learned Dorothy, too, was racked by guilt. Her marriage had produced one daughter, Harolyn, with severe mental disabilities, whom Dorothy gave up early to a foster home. Over her second drink, or her third, Dorothy talked of how beautiful and sweet Harolyn was—she called her Lyn—and of how one day, when Dorothy had made enough money from movies, she’d bring Lyn home to live with her with round-the-clock help. Dorothy’s later tragic death from an overdose of prescription pills—accidental, but coming amid deep depression and despair—would have as much to do with the guilt she felt about her daughter as with the uphill climb she faced in trying to be a black leading actress in a world where there simply weren’t any.
What I didn’t know was that Dorothy had just taken a new lover. And despite her claims that she wanted someone w
ho was available and ready to commit himself to her, the man she’d chosen was married.
He was, in fact, Otto Preminger.
At the time Dorothy had read for Carmen Jones, the two hardly knew each other. Preminger had called Dorothy to audition for a supporting role, figuring from her prim-and-proper look in Bright Road that she wouldn’t be right as the sultry Carmen. Dorothy had donned a wig, low-cut blouse, and short skirt to make a very different impression, and Otto had been won over. Almost as soon as he gave her the leading role, however, Dorothy began to have misgivings. Maybe Carmen was too sultry for her; maybe it would hurt her career. Now Otto was the supplicant. He asked to come to her apartment and plead his case, and when he did, she made him his favorite dinner of cold steak and cucumbers. Once he’d persuaded her to take the leading role, he talked her into taking him to her bedroom—and one of the great Hollywood affairs of the day began. Because he was married, and Dorothy had her career to protect, the two kept their romance a tightly guarded secret. On set, they betrayed no special interest in each other. Preminger spent no more time directing Dorothy than he did anyone else; any warmth he expressed was just to soothe a temperamental diva. Off-set, Dorothy stayed utterly mum. Even the flirting she still engaged in with me was, I think, part of the act. Had she stopped, I might have suspected she had someone else. So even as I drove back after my dinners with her, wondering what I still needed to say or do to win her at last, she was doubtless on the phone to Otto, saying the coast was clear.
But if the secret eluded me, I did understand the subtext. Dorothy needed a special protector, someone with enough power in Hollywood to help pull her up, as a black actress, into the pantheon of white leading ladies. Staunch liberal that he was, with his passion for civil rights, Preminger was probably the best candidate she could have found, and their romance, eventually quite public, would last four years. But even he couldn’t fix the essential problem. A Lana Turner or Elizabeth Taylor could be matched onscreen with any number of leading men, and land a dozen more top films before her luster started to fade. Dorothy’s choice of co-stars was far more limited. She had me … and Sidney. She and I would do one more film together after Carmen Jones, but that was that; a leading lady couldn’t be paired more than three times with the same leading man. With Sidney she’d do Porgy and Bess. But then she’d be relegated to the worst kind of typecasting—playing slave girls romanced by their masters, and the like—and her downward spiral would accelerate.
In retrospect, Carmen Jones was Dorothy’s high point. For both of us, it was an intensely emotional acting experience. Otto had just ten or eleven days to shoot the whole film—that was how pinched his budget was. (My fee as the male star was, I distinctly remember, $18,000.) There was hardly a reshoot; we just went from scene to scene, from lust to betrayal and back, all while trying to stay in our roles through the songs, as we gamely lip-synched. By the time we got to the story’s dramatic climax, in which I strangle Carmen, I’d floated into some zone of raw emotion I’d never felt before. “We’ll do it with a boom shot,” Otto instructed me. “As the camera pulls back, you turn around, Carmen comes in, you grab her, we come in closer, and as you start to choke her, you bend forward out of frame.”
Okay, I thought, simple enough.
Since this was the payoff scene, we practiced it a couple of times without the cameras rolling. Then came “Action,” and in I swung—into action. I remember turning to Dorothy with an expression of passionate revulsion and rage, and reaching for her neck with my hands.
“Cut! Cut!” Otto shouted, clearly very annoyed. I looked up to see him on top of the boom-shot crane. “Mr. Belafonte,” he said in his thick German accent, “when you choke the leading lady in the movies, you do not put wrinkles in her neck.”
Passionate but not out of control, furious but not homicidal—somehow, I got the balance right on the next take. And there it is still, on celluloid, my most dramatic moment as a Hollywood actor.
What I’d told Dorothy about my marriage was the truth. By now, Marguerite and I had both abandoned any hope that we could maintain our vows to each other. We’d always been in different worlds; those worlds had just drifted ever farther apart. Marguerite was a serious academic, soon to earn a Ph.D. in psychology. I played Vegas and made movies in Hollywood. She didn’t get my friends, I didn’t get hers, and, as for Mrs. Byrd, we were hardly on speaking terms, though she continued to live with us—an excruciating experience for everyone. Why not divorce, then? One reason, for Marguerite, was her newfound Catholicism. The very fact that she’d joined the Church struck me as odd; she knew how much I resented my Catholic education, and how fiercely I’d rejected the Church. Was this, to use a phrase I would come to know in therapy, a passive-aggressive move on her part? Whether it was or not, the Church’s views on divorce were all too clear.
For Marguerite, the material world exerted its own allure. I was pulling in real money now. It was all pretty much a blur, and still is, but in the magazine profiles that had begun to appear—Life for one, Ebony for another—I was said to be on track to earn $350,000 a year in 1954. That was some serious jingle—almost $3 million today. Certainly it made me one of the two or three highest-paid black entertainers in America, along with Sidney and Sammy Davis, Jr. That money bought new cars and clothes, and a lot of respect. Marguerite liked her new status, not just as my wife but as the most prosperous daughter in her family. That was, as her father would say, a lot of money to handle.
As for me, I had three reasons to stay in the game. One was Adrienne, second was Marguerite’s pregnancy with Shari, and, perhaps the most compelling of all, my horror at the thought of becoming my father—abandoning my marital responsibilities, as he had done. Turning into a deadbeat. The more appealing the idea of divorce became, the more I resisted it, my own Catholic guilt pulling me back in.
And then, with these thoughts churning in my mind, and Dorothy sweetly but firmly pushing me away, I got a call from Marlon Brando that changed my life.
I was spending my days on the Twentieth Century–Fox set of Carmen Jones as a G.I. Joe, lip-synching in a military barracks. Marlon was on another Fox set, playing Napoleon Bonaparte in Desirée, against a backdrop of extravagant ballrooms. “You gotta do me a favor,” Marlon said. “This girl I’ve been dating just got here from Italy, but I can’t break away until dinner. Take her to lunch at the commissary and then we’ll all hook up later.”
Sure, I told Marlon, I was happy to help out. That day, the choreographer for Desirée, Stephen Papich, brought her over to our set. I was on a soundstage, lip-synching to LeVern Hutcherson’s gorgeously operatic voice, when the choreographer slid a tall rolling door aside. I saw a slim figure in silhouette, backlit by the sun so she appeared to glow. When we approached each other, I saw she had a perfect dancer’s body, with a dancer’s poise, bobbed dark hair, shoe-button eyes, and a dazzling smile, almost too big for her face. I had a vague but pleasing memory of Julie Robinson as that Katherine Dunham dancer who’d performed at the New School several years before. She was even more gorgeous than I remembered. “Julie Robinson,” she said. “How nice of you to volunteer for foster care.”
Over lunch at the Fox commissary, Julie sorted out a number of misperceptions for me. First, she was New York born and bred. She’d been in Europe touring with a trio of Katherine Dunham dancers, a subset of the larger New York–based modern dance troupe. She’d met Marlon in New York, when he’d taken dance lessons at the company—ostensibly because he loved the sensual, drum-beating African and Cuban music that Dunham favored for her dance pieces, but also because he liked meeting all those dark beauties; anyone who knew Marlon well knew he had, as we put it, a touch of “jungle fever.” I had one other misperception about her that I didn’t think to ask about, and she didn’t think to explain. I assumed she was black, or if not that, Hispanic. Weren’t all the Dunham dancers black? Julie’s skin tone was more olive than café au lait, but anyone in the West Indies would have pegged her as a mixed-blood bea
uty with black roots. With that same skin tone, though, as I would come to see, Julie looked Italian in Italy, Russian in Russia, and Cuban in Cuba. In fact, she was the Katherine Dunham troupe’s one white dancer: Her lineage was Russian. Not for months would I discover that truth.
With no hesitation or embarrassment, Julie told me she’d come to L.A. to settle her romance with Marlon one way or the other. She didn’t want to be one of the birds in his flock. If he wanted her, he would have to commit. Later that day, he gave her his answer: He wanted his freedom. And yes, he told me when I called him to ask, by all means, take her out. So I took Julie to a club in Santa Monica to hear a singer we both liked, Josephine Premice, a tall, black calypsonian with Haitian roots whom I’d met at the Vanguard but who had also danced, for a time, with Katherine Dunham. That was the way it was with Julie right from the start—we knew the same singers and actors, we loved the same plays and movies and books, and we shared the same politics. She revered Robeson as much as I did! She in some ways knew more about African and African-American culture than I did, having attended the Little Red School House, probably Manhattan’s—and the country’s—most progressive private school. Those experiences had inoculated her against racial prejudice, and I, with my island background of mixed-blood unions, felt as easy around her as she did around me. We could have talked all night. When I dropped her off, kissing her good night, I felt both exhilarated and anxious. This was the kind of connection that could end a marriage, especially one as much on the rocks as mine.
I’d rented a place up on Appian Way in Beverly Hills for Carmen Jones, and it was here that Julie and I began meeting. Later, Julie would say that the intellectual attraction drew us together as much as the sex. That was true. Julie’s parents were classic left-wing Jewish immigrants from Russia. They weren’t just progressive; they were deeply committed Marxists. Julie was a voracious reader; she was fascinated by Mexico, and spoke fluent Spanish, which jibed with my own curiosity about Latin culture. Early on, we drove down to Mexico for our first bullfight. When we got back to L.A., I invited her to move in while she looked for a place of her own; and she basically just stayed. Eventually she had to go back to Italy to resume her dance commitments there; she had a contract to tour with Walter Chiari, the dashing Italian movie star whose musical revue was taking that country by storm. Still, we wrote each other almost every day. By then, I had no doubt that I’d found the woman with whom I wanted to spend the rest of my life. In my letters, I told her as much.
My Song Page 16