In the first six months of 1958, after the successive failures of Saint Joan and Bonjour Tristesse, Otto Preminger’s career as a pioneering independent filmmaker seemed to have stalled. Rather than a bullish producer who had won landmark victories for free speech, he was now perceived, in an industry with a notoriously short memory, as a European egghead who turned out stillborn art-house pictures.
Adding to the bad news was This Is Goggle, a play he put into rehearsal at the same time that Bonjour Tristesse was beginning its first-run engagements. “I recommended the novel to Otto,” Sandy Gardner said. “It was a charming book, filled with local color, about an eccentric New York kid. Otto, who loved New York, was drawn to the New York atmosphere as well as to the story’s father-son relationship, told from the point of view of the son.”1 The material did indeed stir Otto’s paternal instincts—throughout his long estrangement from Mary he had continued to maintain a fatherly attitude toward Sandy; he wanted to claim his paternity of Erik; and at fifty-three, he might have wanted another son (or daughter) as well.
To play Goggle’s parents Preminger hired two solid actors, James Daly and Kim Hunter, the original Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire. And for Goggle he chose an appealing child actor, London-born Michael Ray, making his stage debut after impressive film credits including leading roles in The Divided Heart, The Brave One, and The Tin Star. “I think Otto knew early on that the show wasn’t going to work or that he wouldn’t be able to make it work,” Kim Hunter recalled.
The focus of the show was the boy, Goggle, but I thought Otto wasn’t saying the right things to the young actor—he wasn’t saying what the boy needed to hear to help him play the part. I knew Otto’s rep, of course, but I wasn’t intimidated—I never am—and I told him how I thought he should approach the boy. He not only didn’t scream, he was delighted to know, to get it right. (When Jim and I called him on his reputation for being a bastard, he replied, “I’m only that when people aren’t doing what they’re supposed to.”)2
Preminger was also even-tempered with his scenic designer, Boris Aronson. “Boris and Otto got along royally,” as Lisa (Mrs. Boris) Aronson recalled. “Boris didn’t like to design realistically; he always wanted to try something stylized or off-center, and Otto went right along with him on that. But they didn’t trust the simplicity of the material, and so they tried to make it visually interesting. They made the mistake of dressing it up, and the show was overdesigned and overdirected. Otto did not delude himself. He knew it wasn’t working.”3
Preminger did not seem “concentrated,” according to Kim Hunter. “He was focused on his next film, on Jean Seberg, on whatever, but certainly not on us. He didn’t talk about motivation or psychology. He was present, but he didn’t offer much of anything. All in all, it was a strange experience that does not appear in my bio.”4
Preminger had good reason to be distracted. “In early January, as he was starting to rehearse, Otto asked me to go to the Playhouse Theatre with him,” Sandy recalled. “He was going to be negotiating for the lease of the theater, where Goggle was scheduled to open. [After tryouts in Princeton and Washington, D.C., the play was to open on Broadway on February 17, 1958; in the event, This Is Goggle opened at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton on January 23 and shuttered there on February 1.] He became very fatherly to me, and when he put his arm around me I realized that something was up. He said my mother would be suing for divorce.”5 Mr. and Mrs. Otto Preminger, alienated from each other for many years, had lived apart since April 20, 1957. By early 1958, Preminger was regularly seeing Hope Bryce, and Mary had for some time been involved with Michael Rennie. “It’s my belief that the trouble really started when my mother started spending a lot of time with Rennie,” Sandy speculated. “Like my mother, he was a painter and they had a lot in common. For Otto it was a status thing: he felt that Rennie was only a contract player while he was a producer-director. He felt it was inappropriate for my mother to see Rennie, but she didn’t think so. She was quite independent, and Otto did not appreciate that.”6
Preminger had tried to negotiate a divorce settlement with Mary the preceding November, urging her, for the sake of peace, to accept the financial terms he was prepared to offer. But Mary was not inclined to. She wanted a lot more than Otto was willing to part with, and to get what she felt she was owed she was ready for a long, down-and-dirty battle. She wanted a healthy chunk of Otto’s yearly income, which she estimated at $200,000, and she was demanding equitable division of all community property, which, under California law, she was entitled to share with her husband on a fifty-fifty basis. When she failed to receive financial satisfaction, she went public. In newspaper interviews she accused Otto of making “threatening phone calls,” of removing “valuable art objects and financial records to New York to preclude enforcement of court orders,” and of intimacy with three women, two London models and Hope Bryce, her former friend and roommate.7
On February 15, Otto “confided” to gossip columnist Louella Parsons that while it had been his intention to settle everything on a friendly basis, after Mary had drawn Hope into the proceedings he was now promising “a fight to the finish.”8 In an interview in the Los Angeles Times on March 6, he claimed that Mary had deserted him on October 23, 1956. He also denied the adultery charges and accused Mary of having been intimate with Michael Rennie for the past three years, providing evidence given to him by a private detective he had hired of trysts at the Malibu house that Mary was claiming as community property, two hotels, an apartment in New York, and one in Miami. He asked that all community property be awarded solely to him. To Mary’s request of $3,000 a month, he made a counteroffer of $500; and rebutting Mary’s claim that he earned $200,000 a year, he said the most money he had ever made in a year had been $93,000. He dismissed Mary’s claim that she had a financial interest in The Moon Is Blue, while admitting that she had “some interest” in The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell and Bonjour Tristesse, “which was not earning enough to cover production costs.”9
The battle dragged on for months, with Mary repeatedly presenting an image of her estranged husband intended to cause him acute embarrassment. “His temper was so bad that he would beat his head on the floor and throw himself about the room,” she said. “When he went into a rage, he would pound the wall and the furniture and he’d throw books and brushes at me, yelling and using bad language. He did not try to control himself in private or public. He stayed out nights and was constantly dating other women.”10 One of the women with whom Mary accused Otto of committing adultery was a former stripper in a Parisian boîte who sold her story of an alleged encounter with the director to two scandal sheets, Confidential and Whisper. Despite the escalating ugliness, Otto at the last moment withdrew his cross-complaint about Mary’s affair with Michael Rennie, and he did not appear in court on March 10, 1958, when the divorce was granted. Mary was awarded a default decree and alimony of $171,000 to be distributed over a ten-year period, even if the former Mrs. Preminger were to remarry. In addition, Mary was awarded the house at 19300 Pacific Coast Highway, valued at $50,000; a New York apartment; and a 1955 Cadillac.
“It had been such a bitter and prolonged divorce—and so unnerving,” Sandy recalled.
Detectives were sent to the beach to watch the house. And I was forced to testify against Otto; I didn’t want to, and my mom didn’t want me to, but the attorney wanted me to. It was disturbing, even though Mary had been divorced before and I guess in some way I was used to it. It turned out the economic rewards of the marriage didn’t amount to much. Otto’s power managed to buy off our attorney, Arthur Crowley called “the attorney to the stars,” who sided with Otto and didn’t do a good job for my mother. But that’s the way the business worked: that was part of the corruption of Hollywood. My mother and I remained at 19300 Pacific Coast Highway for twenty-four years. Otto had put down $3,000 at my mother’s request and we sold it for $400,000. The new owner remodeled and a year later sold it for one and a half million. The house is still standing, but I haven’t been back since 1985.11
To Sandy Gardner, far more significant than the “economic rewards” of his mother’s marriage was Otto’s abrupt disappearance from his life. After the divorce he never saw Otto, for whom he had warm feelings he had thought were reciprocal, or any of the Preminger family again. “I used to wonder: did Otto have to divorce me too? During the divorce my mother spoke negatively about Otto; she resented the fact that he didn’t take her work seriously and that he was to be the only one in the family with a career. But in later years she would speak about how much she admired him and how much she had learned from him. She still loved him.”12 (Mary was to remain single until her death, at eighty, on August 29, 1998.)
“The Premingers had drawn together against us, and I’m sure harsh things were said at the time of the divorce and later,” Sandy surmised.13 Indeed they were. In a most ungentlemanly fashion, Otto in his memoir dismissed Mary in a few bare sentences. “I married Mary Gardner on the fourth of December, 1951. We were divorced in 1958. A forgettable marriage.”14 “I didn’t like Mary Gardner, and the less said the better,” Ingo Preminger stated, allowing no space for further discussion.15 “Until he found Hope, it was hard to judge Otto’s taste in women,” Eve Preminger said. “Mary was tall and thin, vapid, boring, and dumb. She had a two-year-old mind. Horrible things had gone on between them and long after their breakup she told me how sexy and romantic Otto was in Stalag 17. It was absurd. She was an absence: she wasn’t even pretty”16
Preminger as always looked ahead, and while in rehearsal for the ill-fated This Is Goggle he bought the screen rights to two novels, Mardios Beach by Oakley Hall, about the romantic escapades of a married man, and The Wounds of Hunger by Luis Spota, about bullfighting (an unlikely Preminger subject). He announced that the former title would go into production in the spring; and the latter was to be shot in the late summer in Mexico in both English and Spanish versions. Otto, however, dropped both projects when, with a great deal of cunning, he nabbed the screen rights to three red-hot properties. First up was Les voies du salut (The Ways of Salvation), a new novel by Pierre Boulle, author of The Bridge on the River Kwai. In mid-April, before the novel had been published in France and before it even had an American title, Preminger flew to Paris to work out the terms of the sale. He guaranteed a payment of $150,000 for the novel (the American title was to be the not-so-enticing The Other Side of the Coin). Otto was drawn to the novel’s exotic setting, a rubber plantation in Malaysia, and its political framework—the nineteen-year-old heroine is a devout Communist. But his primary motive was to grab the book before Sam Spiegel, who had made a fortune with his film of The Bridge on the River Kwai, was able to. Acting on “an important tip,” the equivalent of insider trading in the literary marketplace, Preminger made the trip to Paris “in strictest secrecy,” as Willi Frischauer reported. Spiegel “did not relish being pipped at the post, and his friendship with Preminger came to an end. Spiegel would not talk to his old friend, who took the rebuff badly”17
While he was in Paris Otto also scrambled to obtain the screen rights to a current best seller, Anatomy of a Murder, a courtroom drama based on a true story by a Michigan Supreme Court justice, John Voelker, writing under the pen name of Robert Traver. The property already had a tangled history. In August 1957, six months before the book was to be published, and as Otto was on the Riviera filming Bonjour Tristesse, his New York story editor Tom Ryan had read the galleys and recognized at once that the material was a perfect fit for his boss. He sent an enthusiastic report to Preminger in Cannes, urging him to buy the book. But Preminger was preoccupied trying to scream a performance out of Jean Seberg, and both the stage and screen rights were snapped up by others. As expected, the novel had a sensational sale. While he was in Paris in April 1958 outfoxing Spiegel, however, Otto read in a trade paper that the movie rights to Anatomy of a Murder might still be on the market; this time he acted with the speed of lightning. But after he announced his purchase of the property, three other producers, claiming title to the stage rights, threatened lawsuits. Undaunted, Otto began to plan his film as soon as he returned from Paris. In late spring he visited John Voelker in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the rugged landscape where the novel was set, and decided to shoot the entire film on location.
At the same time he also laid plans for filming the Boulle novel. On May 10, with his production manager Martin Schute and his screenwriter, A. E. Hotchner, he departed for Kuala Lumpur to visit a plantation similar to the one that was the setting of the novel. “Leo Jaffe, head of Columbia [the film’s distributor], who had warned me about Otto, and who used to sit in fear of him, said, ‘Go with our blessing,’ ” Schute recalled. “But Otto was a wonderful traveling companion, even when he realized that Kuala Lumpur, which had none of the high style he seemed to require, was not exactly to his liking.”18 When one of the planters Preminger spoke to began talking about snakes, Preminger’s face, as Frischauer reported, “grew paler and paler. Finally he confessed: ‘I’ve had one phobia since childhood— snakes!’ ”19 Returned from the scouting expedition, Preminger was less interested in The Other Side of the Coin. He was disappointed at the direction Hotchner’s script was taking and concerned about weather conditions at the time when he was planning to begin shooting, in February 1959. Otto canceled the project “for technical difficulties,” which may have been true enough. But the underlying reason may have been because, in addition to Anatomy, he acquired another property that potentially was even more of a blockbuster than The Other Side of the Coin.
On May 25, 1958, soon after he had returned from the Far East, he announced that he had purchased the screen rights to Exodus, a novel by Leon Uris about the birth of Israel to be published by Doubleday on September 18. Visiting Ingo in Los Angeles in April, Otto had noticed a manuscript of monumental length on his brother’s desk. He was interested immediately when Ingo told him the subject, and that night, although Ingo warned him that MGM held the rights, Otto began to read Uris’s book. “I read until five o’clock the next morning,” he remembered. “I could not put the book down. Before I was halfway through I knew I had to make the movie.”20 As soon as he returned to New York, Preminger launched a campaign to win the rights from MGM, and he was in a good position to do so. Several years earlier, in an unusual arrangement, Ingo, who had been Uris’s agent at the time, had persuaded Dore Schary then head of production at MGM, to take an option on his client’s proposal, at that point no more than a rough outline. Further, Ingo had convinced Schary to underwrite some of the author’s research expenses. “Since Uris was a dedicated Jew I suggested he go to Israel for research,” Ingo recalled. “I went to MGM for financing, and in exchange we gave them an option to acquire the rights for $75,000. Uris went to Israel and wrote the book, which I brought in manuscript to MGM.”21 But by the end of the more than three years it had taken Uris for research and writing, Schary was no longer at the studio, and, as Otto was pleased to find out, Schary’s successors were not enthusiastic about Uris’s partisan and politically controversial novel. “If you make it the Arab countries will close all MGM theaters and ban all MGM films,” Preminger warned the company president, Joseph Vogel. “You can’t afford an Arab boycott but I can. Since I am an independent producer, they can’t hurt me too much.”22 Vogel hesitated, but Otto’s argument must have sounded a warning note, since within a week he and Ingo were asked to make an offer. Otto maintained that he and his brother paid MGM the amount MGM had paid Uris: $75,000, a terrific deal, because the author’s price would certainly have risen steeply after September 1958 when the book zoomed to the top of best-seller lists.
Preminger was elated. Leon Uris most definitely was not. “Ingo was working for me as my agent at the time, and I woke up one morning to find out that Otto now had the rights,” Uris recalled over forty years later.23 “Ingo stole the property from Metro and gave it to Otto, and I got a royal fucking from the Preminger brothers, who were a couple of Viennese thieves. I have never spoken about it, and I have a fifty-year reputation to consider, so I’m ambivalent about saying anything at all. But it was a monstrous experience. Otto was a terrorist—he’s Arafat, a Nazi, Saddam Hussein—who never knew the difference between lying and not lying.”
Ingo offered a differing account of the transactions. “MGM turned the book down because of the Arab issue and because they felt it was too unfriendly to England. Then, after discussing it with Uris, who said fine, I went to Otto. We all made money. Without me, the picture wouldn’t have been made.”24
Armed with the rights, Preminger went to his former colleague Arthur Krim at United Artists. Krim, who was keen on the project because his wife Matilda was a research scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, offered Preminger about $3.5 million in backing. The sum was low, but Preminger knew he could stay within the budget.
His battles to secure the rights to Exodus and Anatomy of a Murder over, Otto in July 1958 chose the relatively unknown Wendell Mayes to adapt the Traver novel and in his usual way began working with the writer on a daily basis. At this point, in what was already the busiest time of his career, Otto received an offer from Samuel Goldwyn to direct a film of George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward’s 1935 black folk opera, Porgy and Bess. Although Otto was eager to get Anatomy before the cameras as quickly as possible— the book was still selling and he was certain his film would end his recent string of failures—he felt he could not decline Goldwyn s offer. For years he had himself wanted to make a film of Porgy and Bess. But along with many other Hollywood troubadours, including Hal Wallis, Arthur Freed, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Anatol Litvak, Dore Schary Louis B. Mayer, and Harry Cohn (who had had the mad notion of casting Al Jolson, Rita Hayworth, and Fred Astaire in blackface), Preminger had haggled unsuccessfully for the rights. George Gershwin’s brother Ira, who had worked with DuBose Heyward on the lyrics, had firmly rejected all overtures for twenty-five years because he “feared [the work would be] debased in Hollywood hands.”25 But when Goldwyn agreed to his stiff terms—$650,000 as a down payment against 10 percent of the film’s gross earnings—Ira was finally persuaded. However, he and his wife Leonore (known as Lee) would never have sold their prized property for any amount of money unless they had had faith in the buyer. And for good reason they trusted Samuel Goldwyn. On May 8, 1957, Goldwyn, who had been lobbying Ira for years, had proudly announced that at long last he had finally succeeded where many others had failed: he had acquired the screen rights to Porgy and Bess, his favorite show. In the same press release he had also stated that the film would be his farewell, the climax to a long career as a producer that had included, among many other movies, Wuthering Heights (1939), The Little Foxes (1941), and The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).
In light of the fact that Porgy and Bess surely had no greater chance than Saint Joan for commercial success, Samuel Goldwyn’s persistence and that of many other prominent Hollywood entrepreneurs is astonishing. The original Broadway production, performed with all of Gershwin’s passages of recitative, closed after a disappointing 124 performances. A 1942 revival, stripped of recitative, fared better, as did an international tour. But in financial terms the piece had a far from robust track record. Based on a 1925 novel and a 1927 play, both written by DuBose Heyward, Porgy and Bess is set in a teeming black ghetto, Catfish Row, in the white author’s hometown of Charleston, South Carolina. The title characters are, respectively, a crippled beggar and a drug-taking prostitute. The supporting characters are superstitious, hard-drinking, drug-addled, lusty, and violent ghetto dwellers. Porgy and Bess, in short, presents a view of black life open to the charge of racist stereotyping. And as if that were not discouragement enough, Gershwin’s groundbreaking work has engendered a still extant debate about whether its primary musical allegiance is to the opera house or to the commercial musical theater. But overriding all concerns, as it had for Goldwyn and the other Hollywood figures who wanted to turn it into a film, was the fact that George Gershwin’s score, which closes the distance between elitist and popular musical idioms as it mixes elements of jazz, blues, spirituals, gospel, American folk music, European opera, Tin Pan Alley, and musical comedy, is arguably the greatest ever composed for the American lyric stage.
Once he had secured the rights to the prized property, Goldwyn, as always, proceeded to approach the best possible collaborators. But he received many rejections. To write the screenplay, his first choice (a sign that he intended to be sensitive to racial issues) had been Langston Hughes, the black poet who was one of the leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes spurned the offer, as did a succession of playwrights including Sidney Kingsley Clifford Odets, and Paul Osborn. Finally, N. Richard Nash, most noted as the author of The Rainmaker, had accepted, and by the end of 1957 had turned in an overlong screenplay. To direct, Goldwyn had asked, and was turned down by, Elia Kazan, Frank Capra, and King Vidor. Although Goldwyn had had reservations, he had signed Rouben Mamoulian, the director of the original play Porgy, as well as the 1935 Broadway opera.
Adhering to his long-established belief in star casting, Goldwyn had pursued the best-known black actors of the time, regardless of whether they could sing the roles. (As in Carmen Jones, the stars’ singing voices were dubbed.) Again, he encountered resistance. Harry Belafonte, his first choice for Porgy, rejected the offer because he felt the material was racially demeaning. Reluctantly, and only because Goldwyn cornered him into it, Sidney Poitier agreed to play the role. (Goldwyn, still capable of formidable wheeling and dealing, pulled strings so that in order to play a part the actor wanted in The Defiant Ones as an escaped prisoner chained to a white man, Poitier was obliged first to appear as Porgy.) Committed at the time to playing only affirmative characters, Poitier disdained the role of a crippled beggar as well as the depiction of Negro life in Catfish Row.
Between shots of Porgy and Bess: Dorothy Dandridge, Sidney Poitier, and Brock Peters.
Goldwyn’s first and only choice to play Bess was Otto’s Carmen, Dorothy Dandridge, who said yes but was unenthusiastic. Although Otto and Dorothy had not been seeing each other romantically for over a year, they were still in touch, and when Otto heard Dorothy had been offered the role he urged her to take it. “Do it. It’ll make you as big a star as you were when you did Carmen,” he told her.26 For other roles, Goldwyn raided the cast of Carmen Jones, all of whom in 1950s Hollywood had found few other opportunities. Brock Peters, Diahann Carroll, and Pearl Bailey signed, but each had a list of objections. Bailey resented the script’s use of heavy dialect and threatened she wouldn’t appear if the women had to wear bandannas. Only one actor, Sammy Davis Jr., a card-carrying member of Frank Sinatra’s Rat Pack and a smug, brash, hard-drinking nightclub crooner with an oppressively energetic performing style, was eager to appear in the film. Davis was desperate to play Sportin’ Life, a drug-dealing low-life—Satan in Catfish Row—who has two show-stopping Broadway-style numbers, and he arranged to audition for Goldwyn at a party at Judy Garland’s house. Lee Gershwin saw him perform at the party and was horrified by Davis’s vulgarity. Famous for speaking her mind, Lee cornered Goldwyn. “Swear on your life you’ll never use him,” she pleaded with the producer. “Him? That monkey?” Goldwyn sneered.27 Davis was aware that Goldwyn wanted Cab Calloway and he got Sinatra and his Mafia entourage to put pressure on Goldwyn. After Calloway turned him down, Goldwyn relented. “Mr. Davis, you are Sportin’ Life,” he informed the actor. “The part is yours. Now will you get all these guys off my back?”28
For the sets Goldwyn hired Oliver Smith, an acclaimed theatrical designer. For costumes he turned to Irene Sharaff, whose background was also primarily theatrical. André Previn, with extensive experience scoring films for MGM, was given the crucial job of musical director. During the lengthy preproduction period Goldwyn and Rouben Mamoulian, opposites in almost every way, had many collisions. Mamoulian was articulate; the malaprop-prone Goldwyn was tongue-tied. As N. Richard Nash observed, Mamoulian “got into the habit of scoffing at everything Sam had to say.”29 To their temperamental difference was added an artistic disagreement. Goldwyn wanted the film to look and sound as much as possible like the original Broadway production, whereas the director had no interest in recreating his original staging. It was his intention to transform a stage work into a fluid, realistic film that he wanted to shoot on location in and around Charleston.
After months of elaborate planning Goldwyn announced that full-cast rehearsals would begin on July 3 at 9 a.m. on the cavernous Stage 8 of his studio. At six that morning, a phone call to his house informed the producer that a fire had destroyed the Catfish Row set and all the costumes. That afternoon, a remarkably composed Goldwyn gathered together the entire cast and crew to assure them that the set would be rebuilt and the production would resume. Unsubstantiated rumors circulated that the NAACP, presumably in protest against the film’s treatment of black characters, had started the fire. Although the fact that the fire had occurred in the early morning when the studio was empty seemed to point to arson rather than accident, the cause of the fire has never been determined.
During the hiatus (Goldwyn anticipated it would be about six weeks), Mamoulian continued to press for an opened-up, plein-air version of Porgy and Bess. Goldwyn’s huffy response was to order Nash to reduce the number of settings in his screenplay. At the end of July, paying him his entire salary of $75,000, Goldwyn fired his director. Adding insult to injury, the next day at twice the sum he hired Otto Preminger. “I was Otto’s agent for Porgy and Bess and carried out the mechanics of the deal,” said Ingo.30 Although he worked out a highly lucrative salary for his brother, Ingo in his talks with Goldwyn couldn’t reach a figure on Otto’s profit participation. Ingo pushed for 50 percent, Preminger’s standard terms; Goldwyn offered 10 percent. When negotiations were at an impasse, with Goldwyn refusing to raise his offer, Otto backed off, telling Ingo to allow Goldwyn to decide on the participation after the film was completed. “Goldwyn was surprised and promised to be fair,” Otto said.31
In mid-August Otto relocated to Los Angeles for preproduction and rehearsals. From the moment he arrived he was under fire. Mamoulian, no doubt recalling that Preminger had replaced him on Laura, took his case to the Directors’ Guild, charging Goldwyn with firing him for “frivolous, spiteful or dictatorial reasons not pertinent to the director’s skill or obligation.” The Guild determined that until the matter was settled Preminger “may not enter into a contract with Samuel Goldwyn.”32 At first, there was a great deal of sympathy for Mamoulian and very little for Otto. But Mamoulian made a fatal error. He produced a bit actor, Leigh Whipper, who announced he was withdrawing because of his opposition to Preminger, “a man who has no respect for my people.”33 As performers who had worked with Otto on Carmen Jones testified, the charge of racism against Preminger was absurd and completely unsustainable. After Mamoulian’s agent, Irving Lazar, admitted that his client “had grossly misrepresented the facts in the case,”34 the aggrieved director had no choice but to end his campaign.
Goldwyn, relieved to be rid of Mamoulian, treated his new director with deference. But once Preminger began to voice some of the same concerns Mamoulian had, the producer’s attitude changed. Like Mamoulian, Otto, as he had with Carmen Jones, wanted to transform a stage-bound opera into a realistic story with music to be shot entirely on location. “I think this sort of film calls for the smell of reality,” he stated.35 While Goldwyn was decreeing a reverential approach to Gershwin, with the score to be presented as preserved-in-amber musical treasures, Preminger was asking for orchestrations favoring jazz over symphonic arrangements and intending to embed the songs within the action rather than framing them as separable show-stopping numbers.
Once he realized that Goldwyn was determined to have the entire film shot in his own studio, Otto began to raise objections to the theatrical-looking sets by Oliver Smith and the too-fancy costumes by Irene Sharaff “Look,” he scolded the producer, “you’ve got a two-dollar whore in a two-thousand-dollar dress.”36 Producer and director, equally stubborn, had daily run-ins, and Otto’s bellicose voice reverberated throughout the lot.
Although he seemed to be losing the war to a formidable adversary who also happened to be footing the bill, Preminger, in a series of underground moves, tried to puncture the producer’s “make it beautiful” demands. Behind Goldwyn’s back, Otto ordered some of the crew, after hours, to repaint the sets and to mangle the costumes. Preminger was adamant on one point, however, making it a condition of his employment: he insisted on the right to shoot a picnic scene on location (on Venice Island near Stockton, California). No doubt eager to get the project under way at last, Goldwyn assented.
Locked in daily skirmishes with his boss, most nights Otto met with Wendell Mayes to work on the screenplay of Anatomy of a Murder. Goldwyn, too, was busy on other fronts. At seventy-seven, the elder statesman among Hollywood producers could not understand the fury that his beloved Porgy and Bess was causing in the black community. The way he saw it, Gershwin’s glorious music ennobled the characters and the setting. He was puzzled and hurt when an anonymous article in a local black newspaper attacked him after he held a press conference in which he attempted to address the concerns of the Negro community. “Mr. Goldwyn smiled in gentle reproof that we should feel we knew more about being colored than he does, or that we would feel that a colored writer, like John O. Killens or Langston Hughes, could come anywhere near preparing a workable script for a Samuel Goldwyn picture. Directly after earlier blasts at Goldwyn for his plans to make this piece of ante-bellum gingerbread,” the article continued, “the producer gave a thousand dollars to the local NAACP drive. Rather like blood-money wouldn’t you think?” “The only thing left to go wrong on this picture,” Goldwyn said, “is for me to go to jail.”37
When he heard that Preminger was replacing Mamoulian, Brock Peters was “thunderstruck.” The actor recalled:
I was insecure about playing Crown, a hunk who has Bess in his sexual grip, because I didn’t think I was physically right for it. But Mamoulian had helped me and I was gaining in confidence. With Otto directing, I was sure I would be fired—I thought he would remember me as the young buck who had tried to jump at him on Carmen. And when I saw Woody Strode on the lot—Woody was stunning-looking, strapping, an ideal choice to play Crown—I knew I was finished. I dreaded going to the first day of rehearsal with Otto. “Now I get it,” I thought. But instead, in a completely friendly tone, Otto said, “Hello, Brock, how are you?” Boy, was I relieved!38
At the prospect of working with her erstwhile lover, Dorothy Dandridge was plainly horrified. She still had powerful feelings—attraction coiled with repulsion—for Otto. On the one hand she remained intensely grateful for all that he had done for her and taught her; on the other, she was bitter about how the affair had ended. Her manager, Earl Mills, claimed that Dorothy had become pregnant and Otto had urged her to have an abortion. “In my biography of Dorothy I left it ambiguous about the abortion and Otto’s paternity, but because Mills was so specific with me I am convinced it was true,” Donald Bogle said. “Regardless, however, considering their affair was over, and that Dorothy had liked working with Mamoulian, Otto’s coming on the film was bad news for her. Very bad news.”39
“No one could be more fully forewarned than I was about [Otto] and by him,” Dorothy recalled.
He told me why he was tough on a set, and tough with others, and tough in all his dealings. “Don’t show kindness,” he said. “People will construe that as weakness, and they’ll take advantage of you.” “Don’t show kindness”: what a key to Hollywood success. It never occurred to me that one day he would be as tough about me. … In a way I felt a certain compassion for him. Out of his own hurt, whatever it was, he had fashioned his own drives. Otto was ugly. Truly ugly. Many of those little men who run Hollywood are ugly. … I think now that Otto never loved and never was loved… . He could have been afraid of it. Love would weaken his essential conviction about toughness as the way, the truth, and the life.40
Otto’s feelings for Dorothy were much less complicated than hers for him. He had ended the relationship not because he had ceased caring for her but because he knew he would not be able to marry her, as Dorothy repeatedly requested. Dorothy’s being black was not an issue for a man with Otto’s willful temperament—to prove a point, he might almost have married her because she was black. The obstacle was Dorothy’s tormented psyche. Professionally Otto clearly was drawn to working with wounded beauties, but for his wives he chose women who were far more secure and self-possessed and who, unlike Dorothy, or Jean Seberg or Maggie McNamara, were not remotely suicidal. Even if Otto had been in turmoil about Dorothy, however, he had a far greater capacity than she did for separating his private life from his professional obligations.
For the first week of the three full weeks of rehearsals that he requested,
Otto, tactful with everyone, seemed to treat Dorothy with special consideration. He could see she was having trouble with the role—she was blurry and hesitant—but he had confidence in her. When after two weeks Dorothy didn’t seem to be making any progress, his “famous temper was directed as fully upon me as I had been spared it in Carmen Jones,” as Dandridge reported. “Now I was the idiot. … I was doing this wrong, that wrong… . He lit into me. ‘You were rotten in [The Decks Ran Red, a minor film released while Porgy and Bess was in rehearsals],’ he stormed for all to hear. The old romance was now as cold as iced cucumbers.”41
Dorothy, lacking the self-assurance or the stamina to fight back, crumbled. And as on Carmen Jones, she often spent her time away from the camera isolated in her dressing room. Then, her coplayers had viewed her retreats as aloofness; now they saw her disappearances as the behavior of a victim wounded in battle and retiring to gather strength enough to withstand the next attack. “Dorothy was the most vulnerable member of the cast,” Sidney Poitier observed. “Preminger smelled this, and she became sacrifice number one. Her defense mechanism was that of the prey and the predator had selected her, staked her out, marked her for the kill, then struck without warning.”42 Finally, at a point when Dorothy had two days off, a group of actors led by Nichelle Nichols, a member of the ensemble, confronted Preminger. “The actors ate him alive,” Nichols recalled. “He knew he had a mutiny on his hands… . We told him to treat [Dorothy] differently… . She was our queen, and it demeaned us to see this man attempt to destroy her every day. Everyone knew they had had a relationship. After the meeting, he was more respectful of us. He was a little more respectful of Dorothy. At least, she was able to get through [the filming] in a more respectful way”43 Brock Peters maintained, however, that Preminger “never found a really kind way to talk to Dorothy”44
In addition to her fear of the director, Dandridge had difficulty performing intimate scenes with her dark-skinned costars. When Preminger asked her to stroke Poitier’s head, she hesitated. Some of the cast felt that Dorothy, whose attraction to white men was well known, was reluctant to touch a black man. Others believed she was simply being sensitive to her costar’s dignity. However, a few days before shooting the scene in which Crown rapes Bess, Dorothy called Preminger to ask him to replace Brock Peters. “I can’t stand that man. When he puts his hands on me I can’t bear it. And—and—and he’s so black!” Preminger interpreted her statement as “the tragedy of Dorothy Dandridge. She was divorced from a black man who had fathered her retarded child. From then on she avoided black men.”45
As he was lining up the shots for the rape scene, Preminger took Peters aside to tell him that Dorothy was having trouble with him. “Otto told me that Dorothy didn’t think I was ‘right’ and he implied that my skin color was the problem,” Peters recalled.
He assured me, though, that I was doing well in the role and that I was to disregard any outburst from Dorothy. We completed the scene without incident, and both at the time and even now so many years later, I questioned Otto’s intention. Was that Otto’s way of getting what he needed from me in the scene? Did he really think Dorothy would explode at me? I don’t know. I’ve never figured it out. I guess it could have been a color issue. Dorothy never mentioned being black, and on Ed Sullivan she said she was Cherokee. Although I didn’t know the reason, when we were on Carmen Jones Dorothy had been distinctly unfriendly to me, but on Porgy and Bess her attitude seemed to soften. And after we filmed the rape scene, on location in Stockton, we shared a plane ride to Los Angeles during which we talked personally and I felt I began to know her for the first time. I saw how lonely and insecure she was. A lot of the things in her life, certainly including her color, affected her negatively, and I have to say that her suicide was not a mystery to me.46
Unlike Dandridge, Sidney Poitier had no trace of the victim in his bearing. Early on, when Preminger exploded at him, the actor walked off the set and would not return until Preminger apologized. Otto said he was sorry, and realizing he could not raise his voice to Poitier, never again did. “Otto could control himself,” as Brock Peters observed. Poitier achieved another victory when, without discussing it with the director, he refused to speak in the exaggerated, ungrammatical dialect that N. Richard Nash had written, following the style of the original novel and libretto. “We all used Sidney’s intelligent performance as our model,” Brock Peters said. “He set the example for how we spoke—no ‘dems,’ ‘dese,’ ‘dose.’ We were determined not to demean ourselves and language was one way to keep it straight up, to avoid caricature. Otto never tried to correct us, or to force us to go back to the dialect; I suspect he wasn’t attuned to hearing dialects anyway”47
While his relations with his two stars remained prickly, Otto enjoyed working with the other principals. He had noisy run-ins with Sammy Davis Jr., fully able to defend himself. “I felt Sammy and Otto had fun yelling at each other,” Peters noted. “I think it was a way for both to let off steam. Sammy seemed to be having fun with the part, and with life.”48 “Otto loved Pearl Bailey to pieces, and so did I,” as Hope Bryce recalled. “We thought she was Mother Earth.”49 But as she had been on Carmen Jones, Bailey was decidedly unpopular with the cast. As Brock Peters affirmed, “Pearl was two-faced and we all saw that she was competitive with Dorothy. For good reason Dorothy disliked Pearl, and distrusted her.”50
Embroiled with his actors during the day and working most nights with Wendell Mayes on the script of Anatomy of a Murder, Preminger was also busy blocking interference from Samuel Goldwyn. “He didn’t contribute one useful thought or word of advice throughout the entire production,” Otto maintained. “He only knew always to buy the best. He bought William Wyler, he bought the best writers and actors … for the cheapest money… . He had an awful way of testing people, a cold-blooded, very egotistical man, always afraid of people.”51 Otto surmised that “much of Goldwyn’s curious behavior was due to the fact that he didn’t understand the technical side of filmmaking.” For instance, Porgy and Bess was being shot in 70 mm film and Goldwyn became perturbed when Preminger told him it was not going to be shot in 35 mm as well. “I tried to explain: pictures shot in 70 mm are printed down in the lab to 35 mm. You don’t have to shoot two versions. He couldn’t grasp it.”52
Goldwyn may have been ignorant about how films were made, but watching the dailies he noticed that most of Otto’s shots were boom and master shots; that there were no close-ups; and that entire scenes played out with no editing at all. Deliberately, Otto was including no extra footage or coverage for Goldwyn to tamper with. “In his sly way,” as the Goldwyn biographer Arthur Marx noted, Preminger was “cutting the picture as he shot it—right in the camera.”53 When Goldwyn challenged him, Preminger erupted, declaring that he was the director and would shoot the film as he saw fit. He issued a warning: if Goldwyn did not stop interfering, he would walk off the film. Goldwyn tolerated Preminger’s high-handed treatment, as Otto expected he would, because the producer could not take the chance of dismissing a second director. “His reputation as a fair employer really would be in ruins if Preminger walked off,” as Arthur Marx wrote. “And so Sam swallowed his pride and remained holed up in his office, barely speaking to Preminger when he bumped into him on the lot.”54
When principal photography was completed on December 16, 1958, Goldwyn, Preminger, and the cast were immensely relieved. At the wrap party Goldwyn was a serene host, smiling benevolently and praising Preminger as a brilliant director. Sly fox Sam, however, may have claimed the last laugh. Before the film was to be released, Ingo inquired about the profit participation for Otto that had remained unsettled at the time the contract had been signed. When Ingo reminded Goldwyn that they had left the amount up to him, Goldwyn snapped, “You left the participation up to me? So there is no participation.”55
The response to the film after the screening for executives at Columbia (the releasing studio) was far from enthusiastic. “One of the top people at Columbia came up to Otto after the screening to express concern about the downbeat ending,” Hope Bryce recalled. “ ‘Can’t you have Porgy get up and walk at the end?’ he asked. Otto thought that was so typical of the Hollywood mentality”56 But Goldwyn, undeterred, and every bit the showman that Preminger was, went ahead with his original plan of presenting his farewell production in hard-ticket, two-a-day screenings at a handful of opulent movie palaces. Offering his beloved Porgy and Bess in a dignified atmosphere, Goldwyn wanted audiences to behave as if they were going to the legitimate theater or the opera house, with gentlemen in coat and tie, and for the ladies dresses rather than slacks.
Samuel Goldwyn opened the film on June 25, 1959, at the Warner Theatre on Broadway, the house where The Jazz Singer had premiered in 1927 and where Cinerama was first presented in 1952. On July 5, Porgy and Bess opened in Los Angeles at the resplendent Carthay Circle Theater, the site of many Golden Age premieres, including the one in 1939 for Gone with the Wind. (Around the World in 80 Days had only recently concluded a run at the theater of two and a half years, the longest exclusive engagement in the history of American film exhibition. The Carthay Circle was so refined that its doors remained closed when there wasn’t a film deemed important enough to be shown on its expansive, curved screen.)
“A stunning, exciting, and moving film,” wrote Bosley Crowther, not usually a Preminger enthusiast, in the New York Times. “It bids fair to be as much a classic on the screen as it is on the stage.” No other reviewer concurred, and on virtually every aspect of the film reaction was mixed. Some reviewers hailed Preminger’s direction as immaculate; others accused it of being stage-bound. Sidney Poitier was both admired and criticized for his dignified Porgy; Dorothy Dandridge both applauded and derided for her ladylike Bess. Oliver Smith’s sets, the removal of dialect, the stylized color and lighting, the Todd-AO wide screen, the six-track stereo sound—each was either saluted or roundly condemned. It seemed as if no two reviewers had seen the same film. Almost every critic liked something about the film, but none approved of everything. Even George Gershwin was not immune. According to an anonymous scribe in the July 20 London Observer, “the work fails—this is heresy—because George Gershwin’s music is not inventive enough or robust enough to support a full-length opera.” When it opened in Atlanta, Porgy and Bess angered some black viewers, and a still mystified Goldwyn decided to pull his film, incurring the accusation that he was censoring his own picture. “For a film that is neither controversial nor inflammatory the studio’s action [of canceling the Atlanta run] looks like excessive timidity or excellent press agentry” the Atlanta Journal huffed on August 11.
Following reserved-seat long runs in major cities, Porgy and Bess was shown only briefly in general release. In the end the film earned back only half its sizable $7 million cost. After a few television screenings in the 1970s, it became unavailable, and at this writing, as it has been for nearly four decades, the Goldwyn-Preminger Porgy and Bess is “forbidden,” in effect a censored property. Only a few prints survive (most in private collections) and none is in prime condition. Porgy and Bess as it was exhibited in its original road-show version in lush color, six-track magnetic stereo, and Todd-AO, apparently exists no longer. It is indeed an indefensible fate that the troubled film has suffered, and an ironic one, too, in view of the fact that a work by Otto Preminger, a filmmaker who fought landmark battles against censorship, has in this instance been the object of the ultimate censorship of invisibility. Opposition of the Gershwin estate, rumored to have been displeased with the dubbing and with the treatment of the score; fear of militant black reprisals; a mysterious clause in Samuel Goldwyn’s will—each has been circulated as an explanation for the film’s disappearance.
Perhaps because he wanted to keep costs down, perhaps because, at the time, he did not have an eye on posterity, Goldwyn bought only a fifteen-year lease of the rights. After that, the film could not be shown without the permission of the authors or their estates; and if they granted permission, the estates would have to be handsomely compensated. In 1972, when his father’s lease expired, Samuel Goldwyn Jr. tried to obtain permission from the Gershwin and Heyward estates to rerelease the film and was turned down. Shamefully, the Gershwin estate over the years has continued to veto requests to make the film available again. Surely, whatever their objections, the estate has a moral responsibility to ensure that viewers have the opportunity to come to their own conclusions about this still contested work. As Donald Bogle noted,
There has been a curiosity among blacks to see a film that, through its absence, has now acquired a legendary status. But you have to let the black community know it is seeing a 1959 film and that the images are dated. You can’t dismiss the concerns of black audiences, you can’t tell a black audience, “Don’t be upset.” But you can ask, what else can we see here? The black audience does not want to see a “hero” like Porgy, but of course they would respond to the music, even if they could not fully involve themselves in the story. If they see it in a great print, the black audience might well appreciate the film in terms of its visuals and performances. But blacks, like everyone else, haven’t had the opportunity to see it in decades.57
Both Rouben Mamoulian and Otto Preminger wanted to turn Heyward and Gershwin’s folk opera into a realistic film about a Southern black ghetto, but were forcibly prevented from doing so by Samuel Goldwyn. The directors were wrong and the producer they regarded as a simpleton was right. In his original novel, as well as his play and opera, DuBose Heyward’s express intention was to present a highly stylized evocation of Negro life. With its rolling cadences in both dialogue and descriptive passages, Heyward’s novel indeed “sings,” precisely the quality that had attracted George Gershwin, who shaped his musical idioms to cues he received from the novelist. The literal approach that first Mamoulian and then Preminger wished to pursue would have disfigured the material, destroying its lyricism and only emphasizing its racial stereotyping. Catfish Row is a separate realm, a “dream” of a black ghetto of the past not to be confused with the real world of 1912, the period in which the novel takes place, nor with the realities of black life at the time of the film’s release. Appropriately, therefore, Oliver Smith’s not quite realistic settings and cinematographer Leon Shamroy’s painterly use of color and light underscore the fact that Catfish Row is a place for musical expression rather than a site for social protest or grievance. (Shamroy was nominated for an Academy Award.) When the characters slide from speaking to singing there isn’t the rupture there would have been if the story had been set in a realistic environment, a ghetto rendered with documentarylike authenticity.
Preminger, to be sure, had initially resisted Goldwyn’s aim of confining the action to a studio-built Catfish Row. But once he had won the right to shoot the opening scene (“Summertime,” exquisitely rendered in yellow tones) and the picnic scene on location, he played by Goldwyn’s rules, designing Porgy and Bess as exactly the kind of stately pageant the producer wanted. Preminger’s measured staging—his preference for long takes and camera movement over editing—enfolds Gershwin’s music in ceremonial elegance. And the director’s style, dignified and clean, complements the decision of the actors to speak well.
To viewers who demand visual realism, the film’s limbolike world may look theatrical, but Preminger’s approach is decidedly not filmed theater. His group shots and deep-focus compositions fused to the horizontal dimension of the Todd-AO wide screen, Preminger in supple and unobtrusive ways employs the language of film to enhance the language of music. (A nice touch that reveals the filmmaker’s understanding of the role of music in the life of Catfish Row is its complete absence, including underscoring, on the few occasions when white outsiders invade the ghetto. In Catfish Row white men don’t, and can’t, sing.) Throughout, as in Carmen Jones, Preminger stages songs not to stop the show but to underline their narrative relevance. His direction of “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” for instance, supports the dramatic reason for the number, which expresses the title characters’ growing feelings for each other. At the beginning of the song, through intercutting Porgy and Bess occupy their own separate frames; but as their soaring voices celebrate their love, Preminger shoots them within the same frame. As if out of respect for their swelling emotion, the camera, in mid-shot range, remains stationary while, seen in deep focus through the open window of Porgy’s cottage, Catfish Row residents pass by. Preminger’s mise-en-scène draws contrasts within the same visual field between the private, intimate space of the new lovers and the public world outside.
Private as opposed to public space is again meaningfully counterpointed in Preminger’s staging of a lament, “My Man’s Gone Now,” sung by Serena after Crown has killed her husband in a crap game. Placed in deep focus, mourners in stylized postures turn away from the widow, as if to allow her privacy in her time of sorrow. Yet the fact that the mourners occupy the same frame as Serena reinforces the motif sustained throughout of Catfish Row as a close-knit community that protects itself against outsiders like Crown and Sportin’ Life as well as white folks who don’t belong there.
To offset what is ideologically if not musically the show’s most problematic number, Porgy’s anthem, “I Got Plenty o’ Nothin,” in which a black cripple celebrates his joy in not-having, Preminger begins the song with Porgy framed in his window—the character is on display “performing” a song. Once he has to some extent protected the song by setting it in a frame within the frame, Preminger then pays tribute to the rhythm and melody of the number by expanding the space in which it is performed. He moves Porgy from the shadowed interior of his cottage to the open square outside, bathed in a golden early morning light. His handling of space in Porgy’s aria, “Where’s My Bess?” is also resonant. Preminger places Porgy on the bottom right of the frame, at the opposite side of the vast wide screen from his neighbors. The empty space between the isolated cripple and the ensemble seems to augur the loss that is to engulf the character when he discovers that Bess has left him.
Throughout, the camera responds to the needs of the music. In a beautifully
Porgy (Sidney Poitier) and Bess (Dorothy Dandridge) isolated in a deep-focus, wide-angle shot on the vast Catfish Row set designed by Oliver Smith.
choreographed long take, the camera stays on a woman selling strawberries as she makes a circle around the Catfish Row set while singing a glorious melodic fragment. As she exits a hawker of she-crabs enters, promoting his wares in another melodious outburst as the camera follows his movement. Preminger’s unifying long take provides a visual counterpoint to the way the two song fragments flow together. The camera sweeps alongside the citizens of Catfish Row, dressed up for a picnic, as they sing “I Can’t Sit Down.” Freer and more mobile than any previous camera movement, the lateral tracking shot here underscores the characters’ excitement about an excursion to the outside world. (Preminger’s insistence on filming the picnic sequence on location makes thematic sense—the picnic is an outing, an escape from the ghetto.) The camera is also released during “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” the subversive sermon that Sportin’ Life performs during the picnic. High-angle moving shots and a swooping crane shot are cinematic salutes to the character’s swaggering, vaudevillian turn.
Preminger is strict. His film contains not a single close-up, even in moments such as a climactic fight to the death between Porgy and Crown where a variety of visual punctuation might be expected. The director departs from his austere regime in only a few places, as when he presents the fight that erupts during a crap game with a blast of cinema rhetoric. In an ominous low-angle shot, the silhouetted figures of the combatants, Crown and Robbins, strain against each other in the foreground as in deep focus the inhabitants of Catfish Row open their shutters to observe the struggle. A vertiginous high-angle shot that italicizes the moment when Crown strikes Robbins a fatal blow is followed by an extreme long shot of the observers closing their shutters in unison. In passages in earlier films such as The Man with the Golden Arm and Saint Joan, Preminger’s reserve undermines tension, but not here: his unyielding procession of medium and long shots provides the right frame for a fable, an opera, taking place in a limbo world.
By the director’s design, cues for passion come not from the grammar of filmmaking but from the performers. And in this “expurgated” Porgy and Bess, star iconography is crucial, a way of binding the audience to the characters. Protecting the image he had been building throughout the 1950s, Poitier plays Porgy with an ineffable dignity. We never see the character begging, and far from being illiterate or primitive, Poitier’s beautifully spoken character is unmistakably intelligent. In a hotter version the actor’s containment—Porgy is a character, after all, nearly driven mad by his feelings for Bess—might have been damaging. But Poitier’s restraint matches the cool elegance of Preminger’s direction. Nonetheless, the actor apparently has “not yet completely forgiven [himself for having taken on the role].”58
Dorothy Dandridge’s Bess is also a victory of star acting. She may be less Heyward’s original hard-living, hard-luck, good-time gal, “a whore in a two-dollar dress,” than she is “Dorothy Dandridge,” a woman of regal carriage. Still, the actress vividly suggests her character’s contradictory nature, the painful split between Bess’s love for Porgy and her lust for Crown. Without the aid of a single close-up, Dandridge conveys a sense of Bess’s tortured inner self, the strain of a life addicted to sex and drugs. Typical of the challenges Preminger handed her is the way she must react, in an uncut long shot, to Sportin’ Life’s temptation song, “There’s a Boat That’s Soon Leaving for New York.” In the course of the song, as Sportin’ Life tries to bend Bess to his will, Dandridge manages to delineate her character’s gradual shift from resistance—she stiffens when the tempter first slinks toward her—to capitulation.
Both professionally and personally, Dandridge’s courageous and undervalued performance was the end of the line. At the New York premiere, accompanied by her new husband Jack Dennison, a white Las Vegas restaurateur and huckster whose financial misdealing was to lead her to bankruptcy, she looked wan, played out. Missing was the sparkle she had had at the opening of Carmen Jones only five years earlier. Then, radiant with possibility, she might have believed she could win against the odds to become
Crown (Brock Peters) in a scene from Porgy and Bess.
America’s first black leading lady. But the disappointments in the intervening years had made her confront the reality that despite her beauty and her talent she would be unlikely to break the color barrier. After Porgy and Bess she would have nothing but defeats: starring roles in a few poverty row productions and nightclub bookings at ever less prestigious hotels. At her professional nadir, she would be the lounge act in a Las Vegas hotel where Nancy Wilson was the showroom headliner. On September 9, 1965, Dorothy Dandridge committed suicide.
In the Broadway-style roles scored for nonoperatic singers, Pearl Bailey and Sammy Davis Jr. also project strong star personas. Bailey may have been a nuisance on the set, heartily disliked by most of the company, but as Maria, a character who embodies the communal spirit that draws together the citizens of the ghetto against troublemaking outsiders, she suffuses the film with a warm, droll, earthy presence. Sammy Davis Jr. plays Sportin’ Life, drug dealer and cynic, in perhaps the only way he could, as a hoofer determined to wow the audience. Dressed in skintight pants, he glides in and out of scenes with slithering dancelike movements. As a tempter he’s reptilian rather than charming, but his Las Vegas–style showmanship is electric. He attacks with ebullience Sportin’ Life’s two great pop numbers, “It Ain’t Necessarily So” and “There’s a Boat That’s Leaving Soon for New York,” potent reminders of Gershwin’s roots in Broadway razzmatazz. Brock Peters, who didn’t have a star presence to project, enacts Crown as a figure of primal force. In Preminger’s mise-en-scène the character is linked to the dark forest into which he drags Bess and the thunderstorm from which he emerges to create havoc in Catfish Row.
André Previn’s orchestrations pay tribute to George Gershwin’s dual allegiances to “high” and “low,” elitist and popular, musical idioms, and the singing throughout (Poitier is dubbed by Robert McFerrin, Dandridge by Adele Addison) has an emotional vibrancy that plays productively against Preminger’s formal approach. Considering its era, and the circumstances under which it was produced, neither musically nor dramatically is the film a definitive version of the folk opera. It is unlikely, however, that any single production of this deeply problematic piece can ever claim the final word. Black viewers and aficionados of opera and of musical theater will almost inevitably find elements of any interpretation to be objectionable or only partially realized. The Goldwyn-Preminger Porgy and Bess is nonetheless one of the most misunderstood, underrated, and unfairly treated works in the history of American film. It deserves, indeed demands, to be seen again in its original road-show version. Made near the end of the studio era, Porgy and Bessis a lustrous “studio” film of a kind we are not likely to see again. “It is a work of great historical value,” Brock Peters said. “It represented a special assemblage of talent, and students of film are unfairly being deprived of seeing it. It is a work of art and I am proud to have been a part of it.”59
Working for hire and juggling the concerns of Goldwyn, Ira and Lee Gershwin, and his racially sensitive cast, Preminger placed his own signature on the final product. First to last, Porgy and Bess is an Otto Preminger film, one of his most commanding performances and an overlooked American masterpiece.