by Naomi Andre
The story of Carmen Jones is told by Oscar Hammerstein II (1895–1960), a pivotal American theater figure who produced and directed shows, wrote libretti, and was part of many collaborations, the most famous being with Richard Rodgers. Several of their collaborations started as stage musicals and, like Carmen Jones, were adapted into films (which included Oklahoma! [staged 1943/film 1955]; South Pacific [1949/1958]; The King and I [1951/1956]; The Flower Drum Song [1958/1961]; and The Sound of Music [1959/1961]). Hammerstein grew up in the theater business, the son of William Hammerstein (1875–1914) and grandson of Oscar Hammerstein I (1846–1919). Grandfather Hammerstein was a major figure in pioneering opera in the early twentieth century. In addition to his vaudeville theaters, he opened opera houses in Manhattan, Philadelphia, and London. He presented the American premieres of several operas (Louise, Pélleas et Mélisande, Elektra, Thaïs, and Salome among others), arranged the American debuts of famous opera singers Mary Garden and Luisa Tetrazzini, and included Nellie Melba on his roster. Hammerstein II’s father (William) was more involved with managing the vaudeville houses; he ran the Victoria Theatre, located in what was to become Times Square, which he turned into the most successful theater in New York during the first decade of the twentieth century. Though the Victoria Theatre under William Hammerstein was well known for its specialty acts and freak shows, like other vaudeville theaters of the time it also included sketches, parodies, and scenes drawn from “serious high culture” such as opera. “Carmencita,” an act with Spanish dancing, was reported to have been especially popular in August 1905.15
Through his father and grandfather, Oscar Hammerstein II was presented with an intimate look at how opera could be adapted to, and flourish in, the United States in the early twentieth century. With a combination of opera houses and vaudeville houses in New York City, Hammerstein II grew up in a cultural milieu where opera could be adapted across social standing and economic status. Additionally, his musicals show his fascination with cultures considered outside the American norm—South Pacific (1949), set in the Pacific Islands, is about French colonialism and American intervention during World War II; Flower Drum Song (1958), set in San Francisco, is about Chinese immigrants and assimilation; and The King and I (1951), set in Thailand, is about the relationship between a widowed British governess and the King of Siam in the late nineteenth century. One of his early successes (a collaboration with Jerome Kern), Show Boat (1927), featured an interest in the representation of interracial black-white culture set in the South with a move in the plot to Chicago, a possible anticipation of some of the racial world developed in Carmen Jones.16
Who we see in the film of Carmen Jones has generated discussion and debate—and with good reason. It features an all-black cast, and we know that Walter White—head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—decided not to endorse the film because it did not support the integrationist agenda of the organization at that time. But the question of “who is in the film” becomes less clear when we consider that although the visual world of the film is all black, the sound world is more complicated. As has been discussed in the scholarship, the voices of the leading singers were dubbed. Even though the two leading characters were singers in their own right—Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge—the operatic singing was given to operatically trained voices. By today’s standards, the most disturbing case of this dubbing is using a white singer to fill in for a black character. This is what happened for the title character of Carmen Jones. The young Marilyn Horne sang Carmen Jones at the very beginning of her career, which would later develop into superstardom as an opera singer (she focused on Handel and Rossini travesti roles, but also included nineteenth-century characters including Bizet’s Carmen and Saint-Saens’s Delilah). The other two high-profle roles, Harry Belafonte (the Don José character) and Joe Adams (the Escamillo character) were also dubbed. In an uncharacteristic situation, these roles were dubbed by black men, both of whom had operatic training. Le Vern Hutcherson (1905–1969) sang for Belafonte and had also sung the role of Gershwin’s Porgy. Marvin Hayes (1926–1995), had studied singing with Todd Duncan and had worked with Stravinsky (as a student at the University of Southern California) and Poulenc (when Hayes traveled to France).17
Though it turns out that most of the dubbing for the all-black cast was done by black operatically trained singers, there is one crucial case of cross-racial voicing—a white singer dubbing a black actor. However, the larger question goes to the perception of voice and race. The Bizet estate expressed concern to Billy Rose, the impresario who oversaw Hammerstein’s Broadway production, about the use of black voices for Bizet’s opera. Jeff Smith characterizes the concern: “As long as the performers did not sound like African-American singers but adhered to the more ‘universal’ standards of classical vocal performance.”18 Although the use of the invented black dialect was not considered a problem, the Carmen Jones film evidently did not meet the mark for the Bizet estate, and they prevented it from being shown in France until 1981.
The “universal standards of classical vocal performance” present complications regarding racial voicing and casting. The 1954 environment reveals two things simultaneously about racial tolerance and practice. First, there was a strong contingent, represented by the Bizet estate and all who agreed with them, that felt blackness on its own could not yield a “universal standard” of operatic excellence. Second, the box office success of both Carmen Jones the musical and the film were undeniable, and audiences were interested in seeing this opera in a black setting.
Jeff Smith has compellingly asked, “Were Dandridge and Belafonte considered ‘too black’ to sing opera?”19 Smith links the aesthetics around opera singing and film technology to examine how the dubbing had created “a kind of phantasmic body that registers visually as black but sounds ‘white’ in terms of the material qualities of its ‘voice.’ … [Carmen Jones the movie created] an all-black musical that ‘mimes’ the voice of white, European culture.”20 While dubbing was not uncommon in Hollywood films from this era, this case of Carmen Jones presents a different situation than the common practice at this time. In a metaphorical way, these dubbed voices bring us back to the nineteenth-century French Carmen sources. As we saw in Mérimée’s figure of the French narrator and Don José in Bizet’s opera, they each provide a familiar “one of us” function in the narrative. The presence of the dubbed voices in Carmen Jones serves a similar tour-guide function on a sonic level. It is as if the dubbed voices are also saying to the Bizet estate (which was especially nervous about the singing in the all-black film version) and opera-knowing audiences, “Don’t worry, we will take care of the opera.” The musical sound coming out of the black bodies was not riddled with the expected swing-jazz or Calypso accent that black actors were thought to “naturally” bring to their singing. Instead, a “passable” musical voice was used: a voice that sounded both black enough, yet also somewhat operatic. The speech employed in the film Carmen Jones reveals no attempt by the writers to find black people from the South who were native speakers of the “black English” they were trying to reproduce. Instead, the resulting imagined black dialect was adapted into the screenplay from the musical by Oscar Hammerstein II (who had written the book and the lyrics) and Harry Kleiner, a Russian-born American immigrant who worked as a writer and producer for 20th Century Fox starting in the 1940s.21 The words that were spoken and sung were a mediated constructed voice similar to the conceit of dubbing—a re-voicing of a meta-language that blended together elements that a white audience thought a black community would sound like.
The audience has been implicated in this vocal drama because of the unusual transparency presented in this case for the practice in dubbing. As Smith outlines,
Unlike other dubbed performances in Hollywood musicals, which were typically uncredited, the voices of Marilyn Horne, Le Vern Hutcherson, and Marvin Hayes were featured in the film’s opening credits and were mentioned in nearly all of the film’s r
eviews. … The frequent references to the film’s use of operatic voices served to reassure audiences that Carmen Jones remained closely tied to the Bizet opera.22
Twenty seconds into the opening credits we are given a list of the dubbed singers. They are presented strategically and are hard to miss. As the film begins, the first image is the central rose with the red flame behind it and immediately you see “Otto Preminger presents Oscar Hammerstein’s Carmen Jones.” This text is replaced with a frame that lists the five leading roles (“Starring Harry Belafonte, Dorothy Dandridge, Pearl Bailey, Olga James, Joe Adams”). The next text lists the smaller lead roles (“with Broc Peters, Roy Glenn, Nick Stewart, Diahann Carroll), along with the ghostly presence of the hidden singers (“and the voices of Le Vern Hutcherson, Marilynn [sic] Horne, Marvin Hayes) that lingers on the screen for eight seconds (a long time in this context when people want to get to the film itself).
John McCarten from The New Yorker was one of the reviewers who mentioned this dubbing specifically and praised
Dorothy Dandridge, whose configurations are remarkable and whose songs, rendered by Marilyn Horne, have a highly sultry effectiveness. I had no idea that Miss Dandridge was not singing in voce sua until I was given the news by a press agent.23
Marilyn Horne was just twenty years old when she sang the vocal role for Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones, and her “star presence” had not yet ascended to bring additional luster to the soundtrack when the movie opened. One of her early leading roles was Hata (also called Agnes), a contralto role in Smetana’s Bartered Bride, produced by the Los Angeles Guild Opera (an organization founded by the city to present opera to schoolchildren) the same year as Carmen Jones; this newly experienced Horne was one of the white operatically trained singers who helped legitimize the film’s connection to the Bizet opera. She talks about the process of recording the singing voice of the leading role:
It wasn’t much of a strain—in fact, it was fun. My job entailed working with Dorothy Dandridge. I had to listen carefully to her speaking voice and try to match the timbre and the accent, so that when it came time for me to record the songs, there would be a little bit of Dandridge in my throat. She sang in a register comfortable for her, then I mimicked her voice in the proper keys. Later, she filmed her scenes with my recorded voice blasting from huge loudspeakers. The tendency in dubbing is to overdo your mouth movements. Dandridge didn’t and was sensational. The sound technicians pieced music and film together and the result is a seamless performance by Dorothy Dandridge and Marilyn Horne.24
Horne’s description continues the conceit of how black and white voices and bodies come together. With “a little bit of Dandridge in my throat” and the “seamless performance by Dorothy Dandridge and Marilyn Horne,” there emerges an interracial, cross-cultural element to the sonic world of the film. I am not alone to notice this, and Smith perceptively writes,
Although Carmen Jones depicts a space of racial segregation on its image track, its sound track reflects the prospects of desegregation as an issue associated with the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties. Blacks and whites could not intermingle in the diegetic world of Carmen Jones, but their voices could in nondiegetic and extradiegetic spaces on the sound track.25
In her 1983 autobiography, Marilyn Horne: My Life, Horne devoted a full chapter to Carmen Jones. In addition to her discussion of auditioning for and working on Carmen Jones, she also provides her views of the experiences black musicians faced in classical music. She outlines a brief history of how long it took major opera houses to allow black singers in, and at the time of her writing in 1983 she says, “We cannot pat ourselves on the backs—there’s still a long way to go.”26 She astutely notes that it was New York City Opera that had first presented black singers in leading roles in the late 1940s, and it was not until 1955 that the Metropolitan Opera allowed its first black singer, Marian Anderson, to sing.
Horne does not make a direct connection between her own hire as the operatic voice of Carmen Jones in 1954 and the following year having the largest American operatic barrier punctured by Anderson. Yet her views not only provide a lens into what the opportunities were for blacks during the 1950s and 1960s but also examine how she was positioned in this era. In the chapter Horne also outlines the beginning of her relationship with Henry Lewis (1932–1996), a black double bassist and conductor who was part of the pioneering generation of black classical musicians who broke through the types of barriers Horne talked about in her autobiography. Though they had met through the Bartered Bride performance in 1954 (Lewis was in the orchestra pit), it was not until this Carmen Jones (Lewis again in the orchestra pit) that they began to date. Their relationship was not inconsequential; they later were married from 1960 to 1979 and have one daughter.
Marilyn Horne is configured in the history of Carmen Jones as a voice that represented the problematic views of its time. It hardly seems fair to associate her with any of the negative ideology behind the casting; she was a young singer auditioning for a part and not at all included in the decisionmaking process behind the scenes. Her personal relationship with Henry Lewis is important, for it speaks of her personal code in the midst of a racially politicized time. She met him during the height of the civil rights era and married him seven years before Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967), the Supreme Court decision that invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage in all states. They were together for nearly twenty years and raised an interracial daughter amid the hope, violence, dreams, and disillusion that shaped black-white race relations during the 1960s and 1970s. The chapter on Carmen Jones in her autobiography, written just a few years after she and Lewis parted ways, presents her experiences at the beginning of her professional career and personal relationships with a caution that might diminish the politicized nature of her actions, but it also tells the story in a careful manner for her primary readers—opera fans.
Who Speaks and Interprets the Story?
The themes around cross-racial dubbing are taken up by pioneering African American female film director Julie Dash nearly thirty years after Carmen Jones in Dash’s early film, Illusions (1982).27 Though ten years before what was to become her best-known work, Daughters of the Dust (1992), Illusions feels connected to Carmen Jones by its similar setting during World War II and the uncanny sensation of hearing and watching the voice of a woman of one race come out of the body of another woman of a different race. The film’s leading character, Mignon Dupree, is a film executive assistant working in Hollywood in the early 1940s. The opening conflict arises when a dubbing situation is needed (due to the misalignment of the sound and visual tracks) for one of the songs in an upcoming big budget film. The original white actress (who is also the singer) is unavailable to come in and re-record the music because she is overseas working with the troops for the war effort. Dupree finds a black singer (the character of Esther Jeeter) who can fill in. In an almost eerie scene, we see Jeeter singing, perfectly impersonating, the white actress’s voice as the film is projected onto a larger screen in the background (hence, we have the reverse situation of Horne singing for Dandridge as Carmen Jones).
But what makes this film such a helpful commentary for Preminger’s Carmen Jones is that Dupree is actually a black woman “passing” as white in the Hollywood industry. Though members of the audience might, or might not, have picked up on this hidden trope, the secret is first revealed when Jeeter quietly says to Dupree “Oh don’t worry. … they can’t tell like we can,” referring to the all-white office and production staff that surround them. At that moment, a good portion of the audience knows what is going on. The more blatant revelation (when the white people on the screen know) comes later in the film when a picture of Dupree’s black fiancé is seen. In this commentary Dash is showing that double consciousness that Du Bois writes about, where to survive in white America, blacks need to be fluent in both black and white cultures. The coming together of being able to read across race and social position while being comp
etent in one’s job illustrates how Dash is writing her own experience and stories into the history of film.
It is precisely the lack of this kind of agency that makes the situation in the Carmen Jones film so uncomfortable. The assumption that the black singers (Dandridge and Belafonte) were attractive and could act but that their singing was not appropriate for opera heightens the exoticization of their presence. We are allowed to see them, but their voices have been replaced by the trained opera singers who are altering and adjusting (almost “dumbing down”) their real voices so the audience will hear this as more “realistic.” Black bodies could be seen and heard speaking a fictionalized black dialect, but to sound operatic, they were not yet allowed to sing and be heard as themselves.
Black Place and Space in Carmen Jones
The setting of 1954 in the U.S. rural South and Chicago presents several markers that ground this film in historical and cultural meaning. The larger context includes a time when Jim Crow legislation was still strong but was beginning to be dismantled, with the greatest victory being the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision (347 U.S. 483) in May 1954 (four months before the opening of Carmen Jones), ruling that the “separate but equal” (from Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 in 1896), in this case with public schools, for black and white students were unconstitutional. In this context, references to education and upward mobility had an especially strong resonance. As the film begins with Joe having been selected for flight school, the energy for this honor is propelled both by the triumph of Brown v. Board of Education along with the reputation of the Tuskegee Airmen, the African American military pilots who had been active in World War II, before the military was desegregated in 1948. Joe is not just an average military soldier; he is one of the brightest chosen for leadership and a promising future.