The Color Mystique: Miscegenation, Marginalization, and the Stardom of Dorothy Dandridge

In the May 1957 edition of Confidential Magazine, Academy Award-nominated African American actress Dorothy Dandridge found herself at the center of a smear campaign that seized upon and invigorated fears of interracial relations. The article, titled “What Dorothy Dandridge Did in the Woods,” elaborately discussed a casual encounter between the actress and a white bandleader. While the alleged dalliance had presumably occurred several years earlier on the California-Nevada border near Lake Tahoe, the magazine broke the scandal with a vigor that readily revealed a racially skewed perspective. The story asserted that “tan songstress” Dandridge was on a back-to-nature quest in the woods when she encountered a “pale” man, later identified as Daniel Terry. Dandridge supposedly seduced Terry driven by her natural sexual appetite. The tone of the writing is unmistakably sensationalist and sarcastic. The writer remarks that after some “very passionate preliminaries,” Terry must have wondered if Dandridge would be willing to engage in sexual relations in the woods. The question was wholly rhetorical. As oft throughout her career, the preceding paragraphs had already characterized Dandridge as promiscuous, immoral, and driven by natural impulse, i.e. the direct opposite of the idealized notion of the white female. The language left no doubt for the reader that Dandridge—a “suave siren,” “a sensuous singer,” “a glamorous chick” who asks for “nothing more than the open sky”—indeed consented to, and even initiated the encounter. All that remained to be absorbed from the story was that in the case of African American women, sexuality was an unavoidable function of nature; as the writer ended the story, “if the birds were doing it and the bees were doing it, shouldn’t they?” (Confidential, May 1957). This was all part of a 1950s climate that heavily relied on the policing of all subversion to reestablish American dominance in the face of changing global and domestic concerns. Visibility was logically one of the first categories that came under scrutiny. While Foucault uses the metaphor of the hospital and the prison to illustrate the effectiveness of the ocular in regulating social interactions, all concerns that necessitated the extreme surveillance at these institutions are also applicable to American society at large in this post-war period. I will argue that the architecture and infrastructure of society equally revolved around the objective “to avoid undue contact, contagion [and] physical proximity,” only in this case, the two parties to be separated were white and non-white (Foucault 147). On-screen transgressions of these strict boundaries were less susceptible to government action, as it concerned a representation rather than a real life case, but this did not mean that the policing did not inscribe itself in the cultural scene: movie theatres were largely segregated, meaning that the movie going experience, even if it included on-screen interracial interactions, never threatened the black-white divide in real life. Furthermore, all-black films hardly ever reached a diverse audience, and several of Dandridge’s films with a mixed cast—most notably Tamango—were boycotted. The fate of Dandridge by no means followed an unusual pattern. African-American performers, especially females, were heavily scrutinized by the dominant institutions, and concerns about their sexual mores often went hand in hand with allegations about their political affiliations. The triple bind that separated them from a dominant position (race, class, gender) made them almost inherently suspects of subversiveness. This thesis will take on the issue of race and visibility, with Dandridge’s career as a focal point in which concerns of gender, race, class, and nationality tie together into a discourse of miscegenation that I propose to call “essential voluntarism.” Neither liberal nor conservative, this discourse manifested itself in an obsession with the ocular, and was thus especially constraining for someone like Dandridge, who found herself a subject of the public gaze 24/7. However, its focus on the visual also inherently generated spaces of subversion. Dandridge’s career demonstrates at once the pervasive power of dominant discourses on miscegenation, as the confusion between her diegetic and non-diegetic persona limited her personally and professionally, and the modes available to challenge these discourses. There were spaces in which the dominant could be bypassed and even inversed. The fact that Dandridge was in the public eye was a blessing and a curse, as visibility has a double function: it limits and it enables at the same time. Dandridge’s visible status as non-white curtailed the palette of roles available to her, but the fact that she, in her public persona as actress, became visible to a diverse audience gave her an extent of political agency that cannot be ignored. The writings of Hannah Arendt, who explicitly wrote on race in the 1950s, and Michel Foucault, who focused on “the ‘instrumentality’ of sexuality in the making of race” will serve as a starting point to explore the rigid lines of exclusion that marked the 1950s. Little attention has been given to either Dandridge or African American female performers in the United States in the context of the global and domestic developments of the time. While the career of her contemporary Josephine Baker has been much discussed and continues to spark interest, Dandridge has been reduced to the margins, even in film anthologies. The international component that the two women share, and that has been the bane of much research into Baker, has remained uninvestigated for Dandridge. There has not been a single study of Dandridge’s venture into Europe and her place in the group of anti-colonial and anti-racist black intellectuals. Furthermore, media coverage has only been assessed in a piecemeal fashion, focusing on white publications exclusively. The life of Dandridge has captured the imagination of several biographers. Yet the biographies that have appeared are either motivated by personal gain—such as in the case of her former music manager Earl Mills—or adoration, such as Bogle, who writes that he was “in love with her” his entire life (4). While they are valuable descriptions of the events that characterized her life, they do not draw these events onto a larger map of social restriction (in the U.S.) and opportunity (in film and abroad), the navigation of which depended on categories of difference. Her life, then, is interpreted mostly in terms of her death; Dandridge died at the age of forty-one due to an accidental overdose of prescription drugs, an ending that mythologized her as a tragic victim of a weak mental health and societal pressure, and that characterizes all appraisals of her career. This thesis will depart from these narrow and retrospective works by firmly restoring Dandridge to the context of a Janus-faced 1950s America. A large collection of personal correspondence, that no one besides Bogle has accessed, a sustained and targeted study of media coverage across national and racial lines, textual analyses of Dandridge’s on-screen work, and a theoretical investment in discourses of miscegenation will form the core of this study. The latter is necessary because existing theories of miscegenation do not adequately define or even describe the social realities of race and gender in the 1950s—or now. I will suggest possible new ways of understanding miscegenation that can accommodate the theoretical and the cultural, as even black-white miscegenation is far from a homogenous category and presents itself in various permutations. As a fortunate collateral, this study will also explore the writings of Michel Foucault on race, a part of his work that has remained underresearched. Foucault himself wrote that “no one wants to talk about the last part [of A History of Sexuality],” i.e. his engagement with race, while he deemed it the most crucial part of his work, and much remains to be gained from a profound analysis of it. The first chapter will set up this work by investigating the centrality of race in the 1950s. It will do so in a global and political perspective, as race was both a category of social organization and a political instrument. The second chapter will look at the consequences of this redefinition for ideas about miscegenation, and provide a new definition of the term to adequately capture the entangled and conflicting forces operating along raced and gendered lines. On-screen depictions of race and gender crystallize these myriad impetuses, and through readings of films such as Carmen Jones and Island in the Sun I will demonstrate how the visual register for discussing race mixing also opened up spaces of subversion. The third chapter will argue that these changing appraisals of race enabled racial fluidity as long as the central binary of white/non-white, dominant/subordinate, did not become endangered. Indian , Caribbean, or even Mediterranean roles were attainable for Dandridge, but whiteness remained a privileged category. The final chapter will then assess the international chapter of Dandridge’s career, both in terms of a comparison between American and European perspectives on race and an analysis of the political concerns this posed for anti-communist initiatives in the U.S..