Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

divas on screen

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments....................................................................viiIntroduction.......................................................................11. Dorothy Dandridge's Erotic Charisma.............................................132. Pam Grier: A Phallic Idol of Perversity and Sexual Charisma.....................583. Goldberg's Variations on Comedic Charisma.......................................1054. Oprah Winfrey: The Cathartic, Charismatic Capitalist............................1415. Halle Berry: Charismatic Beauty in a Multicultural Age..........................185Notes..............................................................................233Selected Bibliography..............................................................269Index..............................................................................291

Chapter One

For this reason above all Dorothy Dandridge is important. I believe she is the only genuine black female star Hollywood ever produced, if by star is meant that combination of an immediately seductive image with the larger-than-life projection of a persona, the combination that also produced Marilyn Monroe. —Karen Alexander

Some drew the seemingly inevitable comparisons between Dandridge and Marilyn Monroe. In the popular imagination, both appeared to be sensitive fragile women in a cutthroat film industry controlled by men. Yet their lives—and the pressures they had to live with—were often vastly different. —Donald Bogle

The American cultural and political landscape of the 1950s was rife with contradictions. As a decade, the 1950s were plagued by fear yet filled with frivolity. The postwar era of relative economic prosperity led middle-class Americans to believe the "good life" had finally arrived. Yet social injustice, institutionalized racism, and bureaucratic mismanagement undermined the promise of democratic freedoms, the enjoyment of civil liberties, and equal access to opportunity. America was legally segregated by race (Jim Crow), geographically stratified by class (in Levittown-like suburban enclaves), domestically divided by gender (through the cult of domesticity), unnerved by McCarthyism (the Hollywood blacklist), and embattled with communism (the Korean War). Ironically, many Americans maintained their faith in "the dream," exhibited patriotic dedication, and displayed the jingoism accompanying the nation's postwar global privilege.

If there was one individual whose personal life and public career epitomized the unfulfilled promise of a profoundly conflicted era, it was Dorothy Dandridge. Too often film historians (Mills, 1991; Bogle, 1997; Conrad, 2000; Rippy, 2001) have narrated the abbreviated days of Dandridge in terms of the exploitation she endured at the hands of unscrupulous industry agents. While there was tragedy in her life and career, there was also much to celebrate and admire. Though stunted by the conservative ideologies of the era, Dandridge's celebrity legacy—which is currently Halle Berry's inheritance—paved the way for black women to portray glamorous, sophisticated leading roles in films marketed to mainstream audiences. More successfully than her contemporaries, many of whom were exceedingly talented (i.e., Fredi Washington, Lena Horne, Juanita Moore, Eartha Kitt, Louise Beavers, Abbey Lincoln, et al.), she became the first major crossover film starlet. With its air of bourgeois respectability, elegance, and sophistication, her persona broadened the image of black womanhood in the public sphere. Eisenhower-era African Americans connected with Dandridge because her élan contradicted segregationist notions of black inferiority. Her celebrity image—like that of Sidney Poitier—progressively negated Jim Crow ideology, which had dictated a discourse of black subjugation. This chapter examines her stardom in the context of 1950s America in an effort to understand how she became one of the first divas of the silver screen.

By examining the public discourse around Dorothy Dandridge's stardom, we gain a sense of how she became a phenomenon of consumption and an icon admired by African Americans, in the same manner as Marilyn Monroe and Rita Hayworth before her were admired and idolized by mainstream America. Through her celebrity, Dandridge was a phenomenon that helped instantiate African Americans as consumers in twentieth-century public discourse. Dandridge's stardom existed in the context of America's changing race relations, but it is impossible to discuss her public persona without also considering how class functioned in the creation and solidification of her image. Heretofore the term black middle class has been utilized, but not in the traditional Marxist-Gramscian sense: as a hegemonic force assimilating to the mainstream and thereby alienating the masses of proletariat black folks from themselves. Instead, the black middle class is discussed here as a group seeking self-determination, economic independence, racial uplift, and broader representation in the media as entitled citizens.

Wherever consumption is linked with class aspirations, and celebrity is linked with consumption, famous people play a role in the formation of middle-class taste. By considering the star discourse revolving around Dandridge, we gain a sense of her as the contested terrain upon which competing cultural discourses of black middle-class identity and comportment played out.

In their study of 1950s American culture, historians Douglas Miller and Marion Nowak capture the irony of the era in their description of the disparity between recollection and reality. They discuss the return of repressive Victorian ideals that sharply contrasted with the expectations of modern life most Americans held as possibilities for themselves. Miller and Nowak are among numerous scholars and historians who have recorded the era as a period of complex cultural anxiety and self-denial. They write:

The fifties witnessed much less happy nonsense, much more conformity. International tensions and conflicts were far greater than had been the case during the relatively isolationist twenties. The daily reality of the cold war caused persons to fear international communism, more importantly, internal communist subversion. Such fears put a premium on conformity. Bourgeois values reasserted themselves in a manner which would have pleased a twenties fundamentalist. Domesticity, religiosity, respectability, security through compliance with the system—that was the fifties.

Miller and Nowak draw parallels between the 1950s and earlier periods in American history. They were not alone in their observations, as similarities between cultural trends of the 1920s and the 1950s are offered in much of the historical literature of the era (i.e., Ellis, 1954; Miller and Nowak, 1977; Oakley, 1986; Halberstam 1993), asserting that postwar periods engender social conformity out of national necessity. Scholars have suggested these are moments in which notions of national community are reconstructed and re-imagined. There is considerable evidence Americans turned away from the realities of the period (i.e., the bomb, the anti-Soviet Cold War, Truman's 1947–initiated witch hunts, and race riots) toward a wistful vision of themselves as happy homemakers, fatherly breadwinners, dutiful daughters,...