Dorothy Dandridge

Is it depressing that she was able to conclusively prove libel on the part of Confidential magazine because of racism? So depressing. Frankly a lot of the story of Dorothy Dandridge is depressing, either through her own probable mental health issues, the casual racism of the era, the casual sexism of the era, or the dehumanizing treatment of a lot of performers in those days regardless of race or gender. Or all sorts of other factors. Dorothy Dandridge was a beautiful, talented woman—but when Lena Horne called her “our Marilyn Monroe,” there’s more to it than just the beauty and the talent.

Dandridge was probably, from what I’ve read, pushed into acting by her mother. Her parents separated before her birth, and her mother had her and her sister tour as “the Dandridge Sisters.” Her mother was also touring separately. They seem to have all been managed by her mother’s abusive lover. So hurrah. (It’s not better that the lover in question was a woman named Geneva Williams.) The family moved to Hollywood, where mother Ruby and sister Vivian appeared in King Kong; I don’t know why Dorothy wasn’t, but she was in movies starting in 1935.

She was open that part of the problem with her career was racism. There simply weren’t a lot of roles available to her. She found it exhausting. It probably didn’t help when her lover, Otto Preminger, insisted that she should only take lead roles after the success of Porgy and Bess. For a white actress, that might have been good advice. For Dandridge, it probably kept her from roles that would have continued her career. She should have had a stronger career after Carmen Jones, but she didn’t. Porgy and Bess didn’t change that, because the reason she didn’t was not going to change.

Apparently Dandridge didn’t like performing in nightclubs, and I wonder if that’s the whole “she can’t have been out having sex in the woods around Lake Tahoe because she literally couldn’t leave her room” thing. She was performing in, presumably, segregated clubs, where she could perform but not appear in the audience. Why would you want to perform there? Dandridge recorded little, though no one seems sure why, and made fewer movies than you would have hoped given how luminous she was onscreen.

Her personal life was miserable, too. Her first husband cheated on her and mistreated her, and birth issues led to brain damage for her only child. Her relationship with Otto Preminger included a forced abortion and, again, bad career advice. Her second marriage ended with allegations of domestic violence, and she discovered her management had swindled a huge sum of money from her. Dandridge died at age 42, possibly of a fat embolism following a broken foot and possibly of an overdose of an antidepressant. She deserved so much more. We deserved so much more of her.