Even I knew we couldn’t consummate our onscreen romance by going to bed together. Audiences weren’t ready for that. It would have killed Joan’s career—if Twentieth Century–Fox didn’t kill the movie first. But at our nightly dinners—all of us at a long outside table, drinking rum in the torchlight—we railed at our complicity, as actors, in suppressing hard truths. To be honest, I did more of the railing than anyone else. “The Irish don’t have this problem—their ethnicity is all over the place,” I’d say. “The Italians—same thing. But not with black people. There’s always someone external to our culture and ethnicity telling the story of who we are.” After several nights of listening to me go on about ethnic origins, Joan smiled sweetly and pointed. “Harry,” she said, “could you please pass the ethnic butter?”
Perhaps in part because we couldn’t express any passion onscreen, and also because we were, after all, in the islands, lulled by those sultry breezes, there was a lot of serious flirting off-set. My own possibilities were limited; Julie had come to Grenada to watch the filming, and I was certainly happy about that. But a very beautiful, raven-haired twenty-three-year-old Joan Collins, playing the sister to James Mason’s expat Brit, caught my eye, and I would be less than honest if I didn’t say there was some heat there. One night back in Los Angeles, I would invite the whole cast of Island in the Sun to my show at the Cocoanut Grove. Away from the prying press on Grenada, our mutual attraction would not be denied. I guess I felt a little escapism was justified, and who better to escape with than Joan?
One of the few who didn’t at least fantasize about a romance in Grenada was Dorothy Dandridge. Mindful of the lurking press, Dorothy made sure not to be seen alone with any of the actors; she knew how quickly a drink at the bar might be telegraphed to the tabloids as a Hollywood romance. Our own relations were totally circumspect, since her affair with Otto Preminger was now public knowledge, and I had Julie at my side. Sadly, Dorothy was unhappier than ever. She’d realized Otto would never leave his wife, and she swelled with anger whenever she spoke of him. She felt the frustration that all mistresses feel, of being, for one reason or another, second best, and that had a special sting because second best was how she was still treated by Hollywood, even after her Oscar nomination. She was offered either starring roles in second-rate films or supporting roles in major productions. Island in the Sun was a perfect example of the latter. The story simply didn’t have a black female lead, so Dorothy had settled for a supporting role with very little meat to it. Though Julie and I did our best to shore up her spirits, we knew the truth: There just wasn’t a place for a black leading lady in Hollywood. Not yet, at least.
All fall, Marguerite and I talked sadly but calmly, mostly by phone from opposite coasts, about how to divide our lives. She was quite sad about the outcome of our marriage, but she wasn’t fighting the divorce. She just wanted to understand what had gone wrong. The easy answer was that my career had pulled us apart, but even she knew there was more to it than that. Politically, I had embraced left-wing causes that discomfited or even appalled her. For her part, Marguerite had immersed herself in Catholicism, which I just couldn’t abide. I said I was willing to grant her full custody of Shari and Adrienne, but I wanted the absolute right to be able to spend as much time as I wanted with them, and the right to choose their schools.
As Marguerite boarded a plane in New York for Las Vegas in mid-January 1957, a reporter asked her if she had any hopes of salvaging her marriage. By now, our divorce plans had become public. “Miracles happen,” she said, and perhaps she hoped for one. Marguerite had decided to establish residency in Vegas, as I had for legal reasons. She was viewing it as an extended vacation with Adrienne and Shari, whose hands she held as she boarded the plane. Perhaps in some corner of her mind she thought that when I joined them, I might see the light.
When Marguerite and the girls arrived in Vegas, I felt a lot of conflicting emotions, above all guilt at the prospect of not being a full-time dad for the girls. But the die was cast. On February 28, her six weeks duly spent, Marguerite filed her divorce suit. It was granted right there at the county courthouse.
For the last two weeks of my Riviera engagement, I immersed myself in the show. I felt grateful for the distraction it provided. One night Elvis caught the show with Ann-Margret as his date, and came backstage to say hello. Elvis couldn’t have been more decorous; he insisted on calling me “Mr. Belafonte.” Maybe it was just everything I was feeling at the time, or maybe our year of chasing each other on the charts had made me competitive, but his manner seemed country-boy slick, and his music seemed derivative. Only later would I learn that Elvis had hung out for years with a lot of black musicians and come by his style legitimately. But he did perform with such put-on flash that over the next years, I noticed, he inspired a whole generation of rhythm-and-blues players who thought they could put that flash on and be Elvis, too. Oddly, almost no American performers ever tried to pick up on the rich Caribbean music culture I’d borrowed from, aside from the Tarriers. What I’d done was mine, and consciously or not, no one ever tried to imitate me. Maybe I should have been insulted, but I took it as a compliment.
When I wasn’t onstage, my emotions kept churning. I felt relief to have my marriage to Marguerite behind me, but heartsick to have waved good-bye to Adrienne and Shari at the airport. Sometime early in the Christmas season, Julie became pregnant. She was now in Los Angeles, where her parents lived, waiting for my next move. I made it on March 7, proposing to her that night on the phone. I had a day off the next day, I told her: Let’s do it.
In the early morning hours of March 8, right after my last show, I flew to San Diego, where Julie met me. Together with her father and Phil Stein, the manager of my newly formed film production company, HarBel, we drove across the border to Tecate, Mexico, for an appointment at the mayor’s office. When we arrived, the mayor was nowhere to be found, nor was anyone else at his office. We’d chosen Tecate because it was a small outpost where no one would be likely to recognize me. We needn’t have worried; the streets were empty, aside from a few vagrant dogs and a hungover mariachi band. We tracked the mayor down in a bar across the street; he was more than half in the bag. He spoke no English, and we spoke no Spanish, but we all laughed a lot. Over at his office, he solemnly married us—in Spanish—and, after taking our money, signed our wedding license and presented it to us. “Wait a minute,” I said. “These aren’t our names!” The mayor snatched up the license and examined it blearily. Sure enough, he’d just married, or perhaps remarried, two local citizens of Tecate. Only after a lot of back-and-forth that involved paying the mayor more American dollars to issue a new license did we drive north as man and wife.
For now, Julie and I agreed, we would keep our marriage secret. Perhaps we wouldn’t even announce it until our child was born. I was worried, frankly, about how the press—and the black community—would react to the speed with which I’d remarried, and the marriage’s racial implications. I wanted to minimize any backlash. With luck, we would ease the news out so casually that it would be “old” by the time anyone noticed.
We didn’t have that kind of luck.
10
Back in New York, Julie and I settled quietly into a new apartment off Central Park West on Eighty-fourth Street, just steps from the basement pad I’d shared with my buddies a decade and seemingly a lifetime ago. Not quietly enough, though; within days, a reporter from the New York Amsterdam News started sniffing around. The reporter claimed he came to our apartment disguised as a census taker and asked for Mrs. Belafonte. “I’m Mrs. Belafonte,” Julie said, thus cinching the story. But that was sheer fiction, a cover-up for the tip the paper had gotten from some supposedly reliable source.
To the News, and the black community it served, my secret marriage to Julie was a hot and controversial topic. “Many Negroes are wondering why a man who has waved the flag of justice for his race should turn from a Negro wife to a white wife,” the paper observed, adding, “Will Harry’s
marriage affect his status as matinee idol?” I didn’t have to wait long to see how it played in certain prominent black circles; though no one said a word, I somehow slipped off a number of guest lists for dinners that spring. The fact that Julie was Jewish carried its own nuance in the tribe—both tribes, actually. Behind my back, I suspected, some members of both were muttering their disapproval, and predicting my speedy demise.
To an extent, I understood the outcry. Marguerite and I had been a picture-perfect couple on a pedestal, role models for a lot of American blacks who saw us not only as a great success story but also as embodying the highest family values. Divorce pushed us—or rather, me—right off that pedestal. And marrying a white woman when the ink was barely dry on my divorce papers left me and my image in a questionable place.
Or did it?
The best strategy, I decided, was to go on offense. So I reached out to Ebony, the black Life magazine, with its vast national readership, and offered its editors a scoop. They could have the story, I told them—our story, Julie’s and mine. Better yet, I would write it myself. The editors grabbed at it. This would give me control over the story, and a tacit seal of approval from the biggest force in the black mainstream media. With that, I knew I had a strong hand.
WHY I MARRIED JULIE, ran the cover line, over a photograph of Julie and me in front of a Charlie White painting on our living-room wall in the Eighty-fourth Street apartment. “I believe in integration and work for it with all my heart and soul,” I wrote. “But I did not marry Julie to further the cause of integration. I married her because I was in love with her and she married me because she was in love with me.” I gave Ebony’s readers a bit of a window into my problems with Marguerite—the long absences that had strained our marriage; the moodiness that made me hard to live with—and I explained, in more detail, how I’d met Julie, how much she’d impressed me with her deep sensitivity to black culture, how as a dancer with the otherwise all-black Katherine Dunham Dance Company she’d often stayed in colored-only boardinghouses with the troupe when they were on tour. With her upbeat, life-affirming spirit, I wrote, Julie was far better able to deal with my moods, and we had so much in common—both in the arts and in politics—that I knew we would make a good match. If there was any doubt left in Ebony readers’ minds that all this was for the best, I ended by reiterating my commitment to black causes—a commitment that would grow only more significant now that I had just signed a $1 million contract with RCA Victor records, and a multiyear contract with the Riviera, earning $200,000 for each monthlong gig.
That certainly got readers scratching their heads. After all, wasn’t the budding civil rights movement all about integration? Wasn’t I a leading figure in it? Wasn’t I then walking the walk by making my own life an example of what integration could be? For those who insisted on seeing interracial marriage as somehow at odds with integration, the sheer scale of my earnings was daunting. What other black figure in America was willing to tap that kind of money for the cause?
That May, I went to Washington with Julie to participate in a “Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The goal was to prod the Eisenhower administration to fulfill the promise of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision after three years of virtual inaction. In retrospect, it was a kind of dry run for the 1963 March on Washington. Many of the figures who would lead the movement through its biggest battles to come were there: my childhood hero A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and members of the newly formed Southern Christian Leadership Conference, among them Bayard Rustin, Fred Shuttlesworth, Ella Baker—and Martin Luther King, Jr., its founding head. King, in that evenhanded way I’d come to appreciate, blamed both political parties for failing to enact the court’s historic ruling. “The Democrats have betrayed it by capitulating to the prejudices and undemocratic practices of the southern Democrats,” King said to “amens” from the crowd of some forty thousand. “The Republicans have betrayed it by capitulating to the blatant hypocrisy of right wing, reactionary northerners.” King ended with a blunt cry: “Give us the ballot!”
Up on the dais with me and Julie, separated from us by a clump of celebrities—Sammy Davis, Jr., Ruby Dee, Sidney Poitier, and the great singer Mahalia Jackson—stood Marguerite, there in her own right as a now-prominent figure. At one point she and Julie exchanged a look and an awkward, silent greeting. It was the first time they’d set eyes on each other. But then, gracefully, they both turned back to the crowd and the cause they’d come to support.
Like a celluloid version of my interracial romance, Island in the Sun reached theaters that June, to mostly good reviews above the Mason-Dixon Line and wrathful reactions below it. The Ku Klux Klan staged a propaganda campaign, burning Darryl Zanuck in effigy and threatening to torch any theaters that showed the film. Exhibitors in several southern cities—Atlanta, Charlotte, Memphis, New Orleans—duly banned the film. A bill was even introduced in the South Carolina legislature, declaring that any theater in the state daring to show the film would be fined.
Zanuck hit back hard. He declared he’d pay for any damage to theaters caused by the showing of the film, and he vowed that if damage were done, he’d sue the KKK for violating federal commerce law by interfering with interstate trade. Interestingly, that was the same argument the U.S. Supreme Court would use a few years later when it banned segregation in bus terminals because the buses were crossing state lines and so were subject to federal law. Zanuck had the law on his side, and the clout to have that law enforced. Duly cowed, the KKK only stirred publicity that helped bring in the crowds. In the South, so many blacks came streaming into the larger towns to see the film that the theaters established “colored-only” movie days. I’d thought the film would do poorly, both because of its interracial romances and because of the meek way it treated them. Instead, it would go on to be the year’s sixth-highest earner, after blockbusters like The Bridge on the River Kwai and Sayonara.
Yet if Americans liked Island in the Sun, they also made judgments, not all of them favorable, about the actors in its two interracial romances. They seemed to approve of, or at least not condemn, John Justin and Dorothy Dandridge for their white man–black woman romance. They felt very differently—as they always had—about a romance between a black man and a white woman. Many bought into the notion that black islanders went after vacationing white women; that was to be expected. So it wasn’t my career that was singed. But white audiences—at least white males—didn’t want to be reminded that white women were often attracted to black men, that some even vacationed alone in the islands and sought out local color. Joan Fontaine’s character clearly felt that pull, and moviegoers punished her for it.
The epitome of lily-white English elegance, Fontaine had starred in a major film virtually every year for two decades, matched up with Hollywood’s finest leading men, from Laurence Olivier to Gary Cooper. Now her onscreen romance with a black man seemed to taint her in the minds of the moviegoing public. She starred in two films right after Island in the Sun, but I suspect both were lined up beforehand. Then came a three-year dry spell, followed by Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, hardly the kind of voyage Joan Fontaine could have wanted to take. And after one or two other films, nothing more. Perhaps when she made Island in the Sun, she was reaching Hollywood’s cutoff age for leading ladies. But this was still a precipitous drop. She hadn’t done Island in the Sun for the money; none of us had earned much up front for a film expected to do modestly, at best. Nor had she done it to please Zanuck; she had too much box-office draw to be his pawn. I believe that she’d done the role of Mavis Norman to make her own quiet stand against racial prejudice. And more than any of us, she paid a price for that.
All in all, I thought Island in the Sun came out pretty well for a film that pussyfooted around race issues and had a director too drunk to work. Along with controversial story lines, it h
ad a charming cast, and intrigue, in a Technicolor island setting. It wasn’t art, but I’d go so far as to say that half a century later, it’s still worth watching. Unquestionably, though, its theme song, which I wrote with Lord Burgess and performed in character, fared better than the film it graced. “Island in the Sun” wasn’t adapted from some island classic. We wrote that one from the ground up, with social realities tucked into its island images. “I see woman on bended knee / Cutting cane for her family / I see man at the water side / Casting nets at the surfing tide….” Not only did the song outlast the movie, it went on to become a greater favorite than “Day-O” in my repertoire, especially in Europe, where for decades it was my most requested number.
I cut another album of Caribbean songs that year, and “Island in the Sun” was on it (Belafonte Sings of the Caribbean), but I also brought out that album of international folk songs (An Evening with Harry Belafonte). If I had any doubts I’d survive the passing calypso trend, they were put to rest that July and August of 1957 at the Greek Theatre in L.A., where I played the longest run for any individual artist in its nearly thirty-year history. From what I could tell, no one in those audiences had any problem with my marital status, either. Instead, the combination of Island in the Sun with those albums and sold-out concert dates created a kind of conflagration of fame, leading to major magazine profiles, a six-part series in the New York Post—then a liberal, highbrow newspaper—and more. It was all quite exhilarating, and more than a little unnerving. Added to all this, I was immersed in the civil rights movement, and fully engaged with the most prominent black man in the world—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. So much for expected backlash from my detractors, not to mention the faithless!
For the doubts that still lurked behind my stage persona, and the rage that all too often surfaced, psychoanalysis might seem the last thing I’d have tried after my nightmarish experience with Jay Richard and Janet Kennedy. Thanks to the Kennedys, I was far more of an emotional wreck—and now far more paranoid—than I’d been before. Yet what else could I do but go back for more, hoping this time I’d find the right analyst? If you have a bad tooth and your dentist makes it worse, you don’t go to a shoemaker to get it fixed!
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