Dorothy Dandridge vs. the World
Dorothy Dandridge’s life wasn’t that different from Judy Garland’s. Both were born to mothers who were entertainers; both spent their earliest, most formative years on the road, touring with groups composed of their sisters. Both struggled during their initial years in Hollywood; both were ultimately better singers than actors. Both were subject to intense press scrutiny, only by different sections of the press. Both endured a string of affairs with men who would not or could not love them in the open, forced abortions, and marriages to men who would abuse and manipulate them. Both died of drug overdoses before their fiftieth birthdays. But one star became an icon, starring in dozens of films, while the other became a footnote in film history. The straightforward reason: Dorothy Dandridge was black. The press agreed that she was beautiful, glamorous, and ineffably sexy, but in 1950s Hollywood, she fought tirelessly, and with only intermittent success, for roles that didn’t cast her as a slave or a stereotype. She spoke openly about her desire for better roles for African Americans, but that struggle, and her hesitance to accept degrading roles, would ultimately destroy her career.
Dandridge was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in the early 1920s, the child of an entertainer and a cabinetmaker-minister, whom her mother left before she was born. By age five, Dorothy and her older sister, Vivian, were performing at local “kiddie” revues as the Wonder Children, singing, reciting, and performing acrobatic stunts, and traveling the so-called chitlin circuit. By the late twenties, the Depression had dried up most of the gigs, and the family left for California, where, at some point in the early thirties, the Wonder Children added a family friend, Etta Jones. As the Dandridge Sisters, they traveled to Hawaii in 1935, followed by a European tour and an appearance at New York’s famed Cotton Club. Dandridge learned endurance, poise, and how to handle the road—but she also lacked almost any form of schooling, having spent much of her time away from her mother, who was busy furthering her own career. In profiles of Dandridge and her success, those details, along with any specifics of her father, would be neatly pushed to the side. Like Garland, Dandridge was a trouper, born into the business with a genetic disposition toward entertaining.
While the sisters were touring with Jimmy Lunceford’s band, Vivian ran off with the trumpet player, effectively ending the Dandridge Sisters’ run. But it was a surprise blessing: when Dorothy returned to Hollywood, she found scattered film work, appearing in Warner Bros. shorts, guesting at high-profile nightclubs, and working in a string of B pictures for Republic Pictures. She wrote a feature for Afro-American on “How I Crashed the Movies” and was touted as Republic’s newest “sepia find.” In 1942, the twenty-year-old Dandridge married Harold Nicholas, half of the famed Nicholas Brothers dancing team, and gave birth to a daughter, Harolyn, a year later. When Harolyn was only a few months old, Dandridge realized she was quiet, unresponsive, and somehow different from other babies; doctors diagnosed her with brain damage, likely caused by a lack of oxygen during birth. In later years, Dandridge would speak openly about her daughter’s condition, emphasizing that her hard work was, at least in part, in order to provide the best care for her daughter. At the time, however, Harolyn stayed hidden, a source of recurring guilt.
By 1947, the bit parts had slowed to a trickle, but Dandridge wasn’t giving up. Instead, she refocused her efforts on a career as a singer, refining her vocal talents and learning how to move her body and better communicate with the audience. Eventually, she won a chance gig filling in for the vocalist in the Desi Arnaz Orchestra at the Mocambo. She split from Nicholas and began working with famed bandleader Phil Moore to further refine her act, improving her “song styling and tone phrasing,” and investing in a set of dazzling new costumes. In 1951, this “new” Dorothy Dandridge opened at the Mocambo to great fanfare, with the Los Angeles Times encouraging readers to catch the “impish, beautifully gowned” Dandridge before she set forth on a European tour—her first review in a major mainstream publication.
Dandridge’s real break, however, came several months later, when Life ran a picture of a shimmying Dandridge dressed in a gorgeous strapless, body-fitting gown, under the headline SHY NO MORE. Life declared her “the most beautiful Negro singer to make her mark in nightclubs since Lena Horne,” thus establishing a characterization that would follow Dandridge throughout her career. Working with Moore—the same man who had mentored Lena Horne—Dandridge had apparently shed her inhibitions and natural shyness; now, she’d “wriggled and sung her way” to nightclub stardom. The piece was accompanied by a pictorial spread of Dandridge’s career trajectory, from Wonder Kid to nightclub vixen, but the real charm was in the piece’s closing line: “‘Somehow,’” she said with surprise, “‘people just like to look at me.’”
With a spread in Life and a chorus of raving critics, Dandridge quickly became a national figure. From San Francisco to St. Louis, she was trumpeted as a huge success, opening at La Vie en Rose, the swankiest of swanky New York clubs, and appearing on Jackie Gleason’s Cavalcade of Stars. But you weren’t someone in café society until you made your way into Walter Winchell’s column—which Dandridge managed on December 3, 1951, when the acerbic gossip columnist crowed that she and Phil Moore were “beyond control.”
At this point, Dandridge had been in the national spotlight for three years and an entertainer for nearly twenty. Even without any major film roles, her star image was coming into focus. Its central and most enduring tenet: beauty. From the beginning of her adult career, Dandridge’s name was paired with beauty, usually quite literally: she was “pretty Dorothy Dandridge,” the “pretty wife” of Nicholas, “Dorothy Dandridge, pretty and talented actress,” “glamorously beautiful Dorothy Dandridge,” and dozens of iterations thereof. It was her most defining feature—akin to Garland’s “big voice,” Bacall’s sultry look, or Bogart’s scowl—but it was a specific type of beauty: a columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier said that you “take a big hunk of honey, mold it into a lovely figure, add the face of a goddess and you have Dorothy Dandridge.” She was, to put it bluntly, light-skinned, with “Anglo” features that matched the African American beauty ideal, which was itself a knotted ideological construction of Caucasian and African American values.
You didn’t have to be light-skinned to be a star—Hattie McDaniel, the first black woman to win an Oscar, was dark-skinned, as were Paul Robeson and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. But at this point in time, you did need to have light skin to be a sex object, especially outside the realm of the black entertainment circuit. It’s no accident that the two most significant black female performers of the forties and fifties were Dandridge and Lena Horne, two women who didn’t precisely look alike but shared the same petite, slender build and straightened black hair. As one black columnist explained, “Dorothy Dandridge was one-half of what every white man thought every beautiful Negro woman looked like. The other is, of course, Lena Horne.” Dandridge would be compared with Horne for the rest of her career, and while Horne was probably the better singer, the constant pairing accentuated the qualifications for black female stardom.
Female nightclub singers built their names on the sultriness of their performance, and Dandridge was no different. The Life feature established her as a subject of the gaze, now able to court others’ eyes upon her. A female columnist for the Los Angeles Sentinel declared that Dandridge had hit stardom with “every ounce of her sexy curvaceous body”; she was named one of the Pittsburgh Courier’s Ten Sexiest Women in Show Business, with a body that “could make a burlap sack look like a bikini.” She was “shapely,” “tantalizing,” with “one of the oomphiest voices” out there.
And after her training with Moore, she had that ineffable something that connected her with audiences: not only did she have the look, but she could “sell” a song—make every audience member think she was singing to them. In interviews, Dandridge declared herself “more of a psychologist than a singer,” working to figure out the precise delivery to elicit the strongest response from her audience. And it worked, at least according to the press: “If you’ve never been in love, she makes you want to be; if you’re a cynic, she makes you want to try again, and if you’re already in love, she makes you want to stay that way.”
In the years to come, Dandridge would repeatedly emphasize that the nightclub act had always been intended as a means to an end: a way to get the studios to notice her. By the summer of 1952, it was clear that the strategy had worked, as MGM cast her as a demure schoolteacher opposite up-and-coming Harry Belafonte in the “all-Negro” production of See How They Run, prompting her to cancel seventy-five thousand dollars in nightclub bookings in order to refocus on her film career.
The film featured Dandridge as a sweet, rural schoolteacher who helps a struggling child. Her natural beauty was on display, but it was a far cry from her nightclub persona—which might have explained at least part of why See How They Run, renamed Bright Road (1953), proved a box office failure, despite lauds from the black press for its avoidance of stereotypes. The other reason: MGM failed to push it. And this wasn’t just some behind-doors gossip—Hedda Hopper stated it plainly in her column, adding that she thought the film “excellent.”
Both Hopper and Winchell, who continued to drop Dandridge’s name in his column, were nationally syndicated columnists—meaning that even if Dandridge never went to your small town, or her movie never came to your theater, her name was becoming familiar. 20th Century-Fox was willing to take a gamble on Dandridge—perhaps because it had just agreed to fund Otto Preminger’s all-black adaptation of Georges Bizet’s famed Carmen. They signed her to a three-picture contract, and Dandridge set about advocating for the lead in Carmen. But Preminger, who had apparently only seen Bright Road, thought her too soft and sweet for Carmen, one of the best known sirens in theatrical history. Preminger had tested every established black actress save Dandridge, and when she showed up to change his mind, he thought she wanted to role of Cindy Lou, the mild-mannered girlfriend of the man Carmen seduces. Preminger told Dandridge she was “too regal” for the part of Carmen, but Dandridge knew better: when she showed up the next day, she was wearing a short skirt and suggestive blouse, and burst into Preminger’s office breathless, with her hair tousled. Preminger’s response: “It’s Carmen!”
The heavily circulated anecdote emphasizes several themes of Dandridge’s image moving forward: First, she was stubborn and willing to fight for the role she wanted, just as she would continue to do. Second, for Dandridge, sexiness was an “act”—something she could put on for an audition or a role, something she could use to get what she wanted, but not her “true” self. Forget all that Life magazine stuff about the “suppressed sultriness”—the “real” Dandridge studied philosophy and psychiatry, with a quiet, serious demeanor and a “fine, thoughtful mind” that “sees below the surface of things.” She wasn’t a nerd, necessarily, but she wasn’t a harlot: as she told the Boston Globe, when it came to acting, “it doesn’t matter to me whether I’m a saint or a sinner . . . it’s just acting, not being that way in private life.”
But once the revelation of Dandridge as Carmen hit screens nationwide, no matter of testimonials to her bookish seriousness could disentangle her from that role. Within the first ten minutes of the film, Dandridge, dressed in a diaphanous black blouse and a form-fitting red skirt, burns the film to the ground. Harry Belafonte is handsome; Pearl Bailey is gregarious; but the film is all Dandridge’s. Ironically, neither she nor Belafonte sang their parts, as their natural voices were deemed too low for the operatic score. Today, that score seems a bit melodramatic and off, but at the time, it was a smash, raking in six million dollars and seemingly proving that an all-black cast could pull far beyond the all-black audience.
Suddenly, Dandridge was everywhere—most visibly, dressed in her Carmen outfit on the cover of Life, peering over her shoulder and beckoning to the reader in a pose usually reserved for pinups. Louella Parsons called it one of the best musicals to come out of Hollywood, and Hopper got so excited during the picture that she burned a hole in her dress, but the real fanfare, at least in the mainstream press, was for Dandridge herself. Gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen reported that previewers were “raving” about Dandridge’s beauty and talent; Parsons declared her a new “glamour star”; Winchell wrote that Carmen Jones was filled with “fiery music and blazing passion,” with Dandridge as “its loveliest flame.” London’s Daily Express even placed her above Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe, claiming she had a personality “as hot as an oven door” with an “emotional kick like a mule.” They even gave her a new nickname: Heatwave.
Carmen Jones was roundly praised in the black press, but its success was met with somewhat tempered optimism: the reviewer for the Atlanta Daily World underlined that even though the film was beautiful and well acted, “it is not everything social progress demands with its All-Negro cast.” It was one thing to have black characters make love, fight, and otherwise engage within a hermetically sealed, all-black world on-screen; it would’ve been quite another for those black characters to interact with—and have meaningful, non-servile relationships with—white characters. Even the film’s male lead, Harry Belafonte, was tepid when it came to the film’s overarching value for the black entertainer. When asked if Carmen would lead to a more sensitive treatment of his race, his answer was a definitive no—with the caveat that it could function “symbolically,” proving that black actors could play all facets of human drama, not just the stereotypical roles to which they had been relegated. Hollywood, to his mind, was inherently conservative when it came to race. The only solution was independent producers, such as Otto Preminger, who were willing to press boundaries.
It was this symbolic wave that Dandridge hoped to ride, and over the months to come, change did seem distinctly possible. Fanfare for Dandridge escalated, hitting a fever pitch with her Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. But her competition was tough: Garland was nominated for A Star Is Born, along with Hollywood darlings Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn. What’s more, as Dandridge herself pointed out, the Academy didn’t go in for “sexy” roles—and her role wasn’t just sexy, but ultimately unsympathetic. She also refused to use her nightclub appearances to lobby for the award: “If I can’t stand on my own,” she told the Chicago Daily Times, “I’d better give up.” Dandridge would lose to Grace Kelly, but earlier in the night, she presented the award for Best Editing. It was the first time a black actor had presented an Academy Award, a landmark Dandridge acknowledged onstage, declaring, with tears in her eyes, that the moment meant as much to her as it did to the person to whom she was about to give the Oscar.
Opportunities for Dandridge began piling up: Hopper included her in the “Top Stars of 1955” year-end pictorial, and the Afro-American reported that twelve “all-tan features” were in the works. Dandridge also became the first black person to appear at the storied Waldorf-Astoria, in New York, where the crowd included a who’s who of New York café society, from Winchell to hotel owner Conrad Hilton. There were reports that Dandridge had negotiated an antisegregation clause in her Fox contract, intended to ensure she was cast in integrated films. With both Belafonte and Dandridge in apparent demand, it was easy to feel optimistic: on the micro level, for black stardom; on the macro level, for what black stardom might mean for race relations.
Rumors floated of all sorts of roles for Dandridge, from on-screen as one of Moses’s wives in The Ten Commandments (1956) to on Broadway in a revival of Oscar Wilde’s Salome. But the choice offer—what Hopper called “a honey of a role”—was as one of Yul Brynner’s wives, Tuptim, in The King and I (1956), a big-budget spectacular. The highly sympathetic role of Tuptim would’ve brought Dandridge worldwide recognition, but it was also the role of a slave. In the spring of 1956, she declined the role, Fox head Darryl Zanuck convinced her to take it, and then she rejected it again, this time under the advisement of Otto Preminger, who assured her that more choice roles, lead roles, would come her way soon.
After declining the role in The King and I, Dandridge waited for the offers to roll in, but Fox had nothing to give her. While waiting for her next move, she toured, she made money, she brought down the house, but there was no sign of the starring role she desired. In April 1956, a year and a half after the release of Carmen Jones, Louella Parsons remarked how surprising it was that Dandridge, who was about to wrap four triumphant weeks at the Savoy, in London, was still without a new role. She’d turned down another part, in The Lieutenant Wore Skirts (1956), this time because the role was too small. The African American–directed Chicago Defender explained that she had been waiting for a “suitable part,” but the fact remained: she had been the hottest new thing in Hollywood, and then she had disappeared from the screen entirely.
And Dandridge knew it. She agreed to appear in Island in the Sun (1957), an ensemble piece based on the popular novel of the same name featuring her, Belafonte, Joan Fontaine, James Mason, and Joan Collins. Unlike in the all-black Carmen Jones, both Dandridge and Belafonte would be paired with white love interests—exactly the sort of progressive narrative that Dandridge had hoped for when she turned down The King and I. But her role in Island was clearly a supporting one: she had waited too long, and now she was billed third. By the time the film hit theaters, she’d been off the screen for a startling two and a half years.
The film was a success, grossing more than five million dollars on a budget of $2.5 million. But it also underlined enduring anxieties over interracial relations. Belafonte and Fontaine weren’t allowed to kiss or otherwise act on their sexual tension; even for that, Belafonte received hate mail for ‘making love’ to a white star. And general gossip around the film wasn’t kind: in an article titled “Dorothy Dandridge Learns Her Lesson,” the author outlines Dandridge’s history of aloofness, snubbing reporters from various African American press and angering the mainstream press both for avoiding them and for refusing the role in The King and I. According to this article, Dandridge figured out that she had to be nice—but two weeks later, Dorothy Kilgallen was reporting that Dandridge was “pulling a Garbo,” avoiding all members of the cast and speaking to as few people as possible. Her reputation, in other words, was quickly becoming that of a snob.
A snob and, in short order, a trollop. Three months before the release of Island in the Sun, Confidential ran a cover story with the suggestive title “Only the Birds and Bees Saw What Dorothy Dandridge Did in the Woods,” detailing a tryst between Dandridge and white bandleader Dan Terry that supposedly took place en plein air while the band was playing at Lake Tahoe. By 1957, Confidential, which pledged to “tell the facts and name the names,” had been terrorizing Hollywood for three years, using a complex network of tipsters to obtain scandalous details of the stars’ theretofore hidden, sordid lives. Most of what Confidential printed was true—or at least rooted in truth, backed up by affidavits, which is one of the reasons it had managed to avoid libel prosecution for so long.
But Dandridge understood what allegations of a sexual dalliance with a white man would do to her already oversexed image. Before the Confidential issue hit stands, she had filed suit against another pulpy scandal rag, Hep magazine, for an article titled “Dorothy Dandridge—Her 1000 Lovers.” When Confidential published its piece, she filed suit yet again, employing a somewhat ingenious tactic. Instead of filing suit against the magazine’s publisher alone, she expanded the suit to include the California distributor of Confidential. If the case went to court, the distributor would be required to name every retailer of the magazine—drugstores, newsstands, etc.—on the public record. Confidential sold like crazy, but it was also incredibly lowbrow, and few merchants would want to have their store name publicly linked with Confidential’s. To avoid losing their entire California distribution network, Confidential offered a ten-thousand-dollar settlement and promised to print an apology in an upcoming issue.
But the apology never came. Before they could print it, the California attorney general brought Confidential and its publishers to court on charges of conspiracy to publish criminal libel. The high-profile case became known as the Trial of the 100 Stars, because at least a hundred Hollywood stars were the subject of the magazine’s supposed libel and could thus be called to the stand as witnesses for the prosecution. As the trial started, dozens of stars fled the city, hoping to avoid testifying. It wasn’t just that they didn’t want to be in a courtroom—if they were called to the stand, the jury would also have to hear a reading of a libelous article in which they had been named. Confidential had a circulation of more than twelve million, but the contents of this article, including summaries of dozens of other Confidential narratives in question, would reach the eyes of everyone who read the newspaper. Even if the stories weren’t true, the star’s name would be linked, in national press, with scandalous behavior. It was a public relations nightmare.
In the end, only two stars were called to the stand: Maureen O’Hara, who supposedly took a “tumble” with a “Latin Lothario” in the back of a movie theater, and Dorothy Dandridge. But neither side of the case knew that when Dandridge took the stand, she would offer an incisive indictment of the enduring racial politics in America. For her defense against the story was simple: she couldn’t have fornicated with a white man outside, because the prejudice against black people in Lake Tahoe was so strong that she could hardly leave her hotel room. In fact, racial prejudice was so rampant that Dandridge did not even go in public with her “Negro associate,” Phil Moore, let alone take a nature walk, by herself, to supposedly rendezvous with a white bandleader.
Her words, according to the New York Amsterdam News, were a “blast at American standards and morals” and made a visible impression on the judge, jury, prosecution, and defense. After a highly theatrical week, with jurors attempting to keep a straight face as the salacious, often hilariously phrased Confidential stories were read aloud, the trial drew to a close. But the jury couldn’t reach a verdict, and it would take months for the judge to negotiate a deal that would ultimately lead to the publisher’s sale of the magazine. But neither the hung jury nor Dandridge’s convincing testimony could disentangle her name from Confidential’s and, by extension, the brazen sexuality it suggested. She’d done nothing wrong; in fact, she was the one who had been libeled. But the association remained.
Dandridge had reached a crossroads, both professionally and personally. Because in addition to her career and court woes, she had also just ended a tumultuous relationship with the very married Otto Preminger. It’s unclear how much of an open secret the relationship was, at least within the bounds of Hollywood, but tantalizing bits appeared in the gossip columns for those willing to read between the lines. In February 1955, for example, Parsons reported that Preminger was supervising every detail of Dandridge’s new nightclub act, attending rehearsals and the Vegas premiere—a service for which Dandridge was “very appreciative,” hoping to make another musical with him.
Dandridge’s affair with Preminger wouldn’t come to light for more than a decade, when the memoirs she was writing at the time of her death finally reached print. The affair also figured prominently in the Halle Berry biopic based on those memoirs, and today, most people familiar with Dandridge know of the affair and its ramifications on her career. Over their four-year affair, Dandridge would become pregnant with Preminger’s child; when it became clear that he would not leave his wife, she was forced to abort the baby or end her career. The choice was a stark one—especially given her guilt over her first child’s brain damage. But a marriage of that sort, at that time, under those circumstances, would’ve effectively blackballed her from Hollywood.
Dandridge managed to extricate herself from her relationship with Preminger, and starting in October, rumors began to circulate concerning recent dates with a “white-haired headwaiter” at one of the Vegas casinos. Dandridge discreetly dated this headwaiter, Jack Denison, for the next year, likely conscious of how a high-profile romance with a white man would affect her career following the Confidential story and trial. Following the release of Island, Dandridge completed two oddball pictures. The first, an Italian production called Tamango (1958), featured Dandridge as a slave, but due to its interracial relationship, it struggled to find an American distributor. The second, The Decks Ran Red (1958), was a high seas thriller—and clearly a B picture. Dandridge’s role, if not her performance, was lauded, in part because it was what, in today’s parlance, we’d call “color-blind,” aka absent any specific discussion of race or race dynamics. Neither film bombed, but they were a far cry from the A-picture trajectory of Carmen Jones.
So Dandridge did something that she would have categorically refused just a few years prior: she agreed to play Bess in Porgy and Bess (1959). On its face, the role was everything Dandridge had been looking for—its producer, Samuel Goldwyn, was known for his high-budget, supersuccessful films. The story of the wayward Porgy and Bess had been enormously successful as a book, a play, and an opera, and with the director of the opera already on board, it seemed like a natural hit. The problem, then, was its characterization of African Americans. Dandridge’s character was a drug-addled prostitute, and the rest of the characters in the film were various iterations of black stereotypes: drug dealers, ne’er-do-wells, rapists, murderers, and beggars. Harry Belafonte turned down the role of Porgy, and Sidney Poitier attempted to, before his manager promised to get him to reconsider, prompting Goldwyn to claim that they’d had an “oral agreement.” Sammy Davis Jr. was the only actor in Hollywood willing to play the role of Porgy’s drug dealer, Sportin’ Life. But Goldwyn told Dandridge she was the only actress he could imagine in the role of Bess: she had to accept.
The role seemed like Dandridge’s last chance at legitimate stardom. If Porgy and Bess succeeded, she could restart her career; even at the age of thirty-seven, she still looked young. But the film was embroiled in turmoil from the start. On the first day of rehearsals, a flash fire burned through the soundstage, destroying millions of dollars in sets and costumes. The reason for the fire was never determined, but rumors of arson began to spread, exacerbated by vocal protests of the film’s negative depiction of African Americans. While the sets were being rebuilt, long-running disagreements between director Rouben Mamoulian and Goldwyn reached a tipping point, culminating with Goldwyn kicking Mamoulian off the picture and replacing him with Otto Preminger.
What Goldwyn did not anticipate, however, is how a personal dispute would turn into an industry-wide confrontation. Following Mamoulian’s dismissal, Leigh Whipper—one of the main supporting actors, who had also worked with Mamoulian on the stage adaptation—resigned from the picture, publicly stating that he would not participate in “any project that may prove derogatory to my race,” which he claimed Preminger’s adaptation would be. Whether it was simply a matter of loyalty or not, Leigh was also the head of the Negro Actors Guild of America, and declared that the guild’s twelve hundred members would have no association with the film.
But none of the major actors were enrolled in the guild, and Pearl Bailey and Sammy Davis Jr. went so far as to issue public statements in support of Preminger. Even the head of the NAACP voiced his confidence that Porgy and Bess would be in “the best of taste and with utmost regard for the dignity of the Negro people.” As for Dandridge, she had no comment—perhaps because if she had known that Preminger would be her director, she never would’ve signed on to the picture. As filming resumed, she was miserable. Preminger had long been known for his harsh manner on set, and now, vindictive toward Dandridge, who had been the one to sever things for good, he ratcheted up his harshness, regularly bringing her to tears.
The poster for Porgy and Bess promised “a new era in motion pictures.” But it was not to be: despite its six-million-dollar budget, its big-name producer, and its months in postproduction refining the score, the film was an unmitigated flop. Poitier had films lined up for miles and Davis had the Rat Pack, but for Dandridge, it was a disaster. In the months leading up to the film’s release, she had quietly wed Jack Denison. He had pursued her for years, sending her flowers in the earliest days of her post-Carmen club appearances. In him, she had found a man with whom she could share “a wonderful understanding.” As Dandridge explained to the press, Denison didn’t begrudge her her fame or independence, and had no desire to live a high-profile life. The charged subject of their “mixed marriage” seemingly concerned everyone but them.
But this was before the turn in Dandridge’s career. After the disappointment of Porgy and Bess, she struggled to find work, appearing in lowbrow European productions and performing for free at her husband’s floundering Sunset Strip nightclub, rumored to be funded on Dandridge’s earnings. When a group of reviewers from the black press screened Tamango, finally released in the United States in September 1959, it was, as one critic remembered, “one of the worst movies any of us had ever seen.” At the post-screening celebration, held at the Denison-owned nightclub, they found a desperate, melancholy space, with less than a half dozen paying customers.
There were rumors of a comeback, as there always are with faded, crumpled stars: a biopic of Billie Holiday; a television show with Nat King Cole. But none of them came to pass. As she told the Los Angeles Times, Hollywood had finally gotten past stereotypes when it came to black performers—but now, “too many producers are afraid to use us at all. Rather than do wrong, they do nothing.” Some of the work she refused on principle: when offered a gig at the halftime of a Redskins game, she publicly declined, citing the team’s refusal to hire an African American player. One day, her marriage was reported “a bust” after a hysterical fight over dinner; the next, she was telling a gossip columnist that she and Denison were considering a double adoption, one Greek child, one black child.
By August 1962, Dandridge had dropped off the national radar. When she abruptly quit her gig as a supporting player in a Chicago performance of West Side Story, she was reported to have been suffering from “severe exhaustion.” A writer for the Chicago Defender articulated the unspoken worry: since Marilyn Monroe’s death just weeks before, “sick,” especially when applied to troubled stars, augured something tragic. Two months later, Dandridge filed for divorce, revealing that Denison had stuck her violently on several occasions. The black press had never fallen over itself to sanction the wedding; now, the Philadelphia Tribune spoke freely, claiming that the marriage had been a “three year masquerade” in which Dandridge played the part of contented wife, while Denison treated her “as his meal ticket.”
When Dandridge declared bankruptcy four months later, she was confirming what everyone had expected. No longer able to afford her daughter’s personal care, she was forced to place her in a state mental home. She took on embarrassing gigs, and then no gigs at all. She disappeared into her tiny Sunset Strip apartment until, over the summer of 1965, she began plotting a comeback with the help of her longtime manager, traveling to Mexico and signing a contract for a smattering of film roles and appearances. But on September 8, 1965, when her manager arrived to arrange for a costume fitting, he found Dandridge, naked save a blue scarf around her neck, dead in the bathroom. Cause of death: an overdose of depression medication. Dandridge was forty-two years old. She had two dollars in her bank account.
In the end, Hollywood forced Dandridge to embody one of the stereotypes she loathed so fiercely: the tragic mulatto, a woman accepted in some ways by both the black and white communities but rejected in other crucial, heartbreaking ways. The white community loved her “white” beauty, the hazy allure of her sexuality, but refused to let her act on it—at least not on-screen, and certainly not with a white man. Dandridge saw this clearly. “America was not geared to make me into a Liz Taylor, Monroe, or a Gardner,” she explained. “My sex symbolism was as a wanton, a prostitute, not as a woman seeking love and a husband, like other women.”
Just a decade after her death, Dandridge may have found parts, as Sidney Poitier did, in pictures that helped spark conversations about race, integration, and interracial marriage. Twenty years later, she could’ve been a blaxploitation queen. Thirty years later, she could’ve been a cross between Beyoncé and Kerry Washington. Yet Dandridge’s life, and its parallels to the present, illuminates how far our society has come—and how far it hasn’t. Fifty years after her death, the vestiges of discrimination, prejudice, and sexual stereotyping remain. To be a mainstream black female star in Hollywood is to inhabit a circumscribed world. Whitney Houston could do little more than kiss Kevin Costner in The Bodyguard; Halle Berry was roundly criticized for taking a hypersexualized role in Monster’s Ball, which, according to some, is the reason she was awarded an Oscar—a win she dedicated to Dandridge. Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, Jennifer Hudson, Mo’Nique—none of them can get a leading role in a major Hollywood picture, much less a romantic leading role. “If I were Betty Grable,” Dandridge wrote, “I would capture the world.” That race still holds that much weight today, more than fifty years after her death, speaks to the true tragedy of Dorothy Dandridge’s life: that of unspoken, insidious, enduring prejudice.