Surrendering Dorothy -- `Dandridge' Looks At A Star-Crossed Starlet

Her face was the key. She had the body, too, and a slithering walk that made the most of her dangerous curves. She sang beautifully. But that face, an intoxicating combination of innocence and come-hither desire, with a smile that warmed you in one moment and whipped you the next, was what made her a celebrity.

In spite of her film successes in the mid-'50s, the sex symbol caved in to the ravages of fame: Abuse at the hands of men led to cocktails of booze and pills. She died at an early age under mysterious circumstances.

This could be Marilyn Monroe. But it's Dorothy Dandridge, a contemporary of Monroe whose path to stardom paralleled hers - to a point. Their similarities ended simply by looking at Dandridge's face: She was black. And while posthumous iconography by the likes of Andy Warhol has kept Monroe's image ubiquitous, Dandridge, star of "Carmen Jones" and "Porgy and Bess," is all but forgotten by many Americans.

Halle Berry hopes to change that with her loose biopic "Introducing Dorothy Dandridge," airing Saturday at 9 p.m. on HBO. Berry ("Boomerang," "Bulworth"), a growing starlet in her own right, executive-produced the tale and tries to hand the Hollywood sex symbol to us on a silver platter. But "Introducing Dorothy Dandridge" does not give you the full embrace. It is simply a handshake.

The tale follows your basic tragic-starlet formula, making much of Dandridge's tribulations (mostly at the hands of unscrupulous men) and hollowing out her triumphs. Told in a phone call to a friend by Berry's Dandridge, it begins with the height of her career on the Chitlin Circuit (the black vaudeville), singing with the Dandridge Sisters at Harlem's Cotton Club. Her first husband, famed tap dancer Harold Nicholas (Obba Babatunde), shows her the road to stardom, but the difficulty of raising their mentally retarded daughter, Lynn, shatters their marriage.

Dandridge's affair with director Otto Preminger (Klaus Maria Brandauer) and her Oscar nomination for "Carmen Jones" mark her peak. Soon, however, she slides into an unceremonious pit of substance and spousal abuse at the hands of her second husband, Jack Dennison (D.B. Sweeney).

There's not enough of the real Dandridge in the picture - a shame, considering that Berry's introduction to the starlet will be the first for many viewers. Dandridge's image has come back in vogue in recent years, mainly because of the struggle to secure the rights to the actress's life story and a critically acclaimed 1997 biography by Donald Bogle.

Along with Berry, Whitney Houston and Janet Jackson have danced around the idea of filming a Dandridge biography for years. Though she didn't have the clout of Houston and Jackson, Berry surprisingly won out, securing the rights to the late star's story from her former manager, Earl Mills (played in the movie by Brent Spiner), sometime in 1996.

That may be part of the problem. The film is based on Mills' Dandridge biography, a loving portrait of the star that is also out of print. Mills, though a good source because of his inside knowledge about Dandridge, was also in love with her (in Bogle's book, Dandridge's best friend, Geri Branton, refers to him as her lapdog), and it shows: Berry's Dandridge has two faces, the angel and the victim. Her crumbling is attributed almost completely to the weight of her skin color in the 1950s. There's little mention of the relationship with her black audience, or Dandridge's use and abuse of her sexual power over numerous men. We never get a sense of Dandridge as a fully developed human being.

In her day, Dandridge came to symbolize many things. To black audiences, she was a heroine, the first black woman on the cover of Life and one of the first African-American actresses to win major roles portraying characters other than slaves and mammies. Her characters addressed the complexities of interracial desire, and she gave America its first onscreen interracial kiss. But Dandridge paid her dues. Among her early parts was that of Congoroo in "Ride 'Em Cowboy" and Queen Melmendi, a jungle ruler saved by a white Tarzan, in "Tarzan's Peril." All was forgiven with 1954's "Carmen Jones."

"Carmen," adapted from Bizet's opera, was still socially problematic; Its main character was a whore. But a kiss of operatics elevated the role and the film itself, not to mention its fair depiction of black people (and, in Dandridge's case, in beautiful clothes). Dandridge's screen presence and Oscar nomination made her a star, and she became an object of desire for men the world over.

That was part of the problem. Besides difficulties in her personal life, stemming from sexual abuse when she was young and, later, Preminger's controlling influence, Dandridge tussled with the implications of her sex appeal. Her attractiveness to white audiences came with baggage. She worked under the shadow of an uneasy sexual history between white men and black women, and couldn't break out of sexually charged roles portraying black women mainly as wanton objects of desire.

Dandridge also dated white men, a source of dismay among her black fans. Yet she couldn't get a foothold in the white world.

Nor did subsequent roles come pouring in after "Carmen," besides a mess called "Island in the Sun" (1957) and "Porgy and Bess" (1959), during which Preminger treated her viciously. ("Porgy and Bess" was a failure financially, and today it's not even available on video, even though it's much requested.) After the marriage to Dennison decimated her finances, she struggled for work and with a drug addiction. In 1965, at the age of 42, she died of what coroners said was a drug overdose.

"Introducing" doesn't address much of Dandridge's social complexity. It's a basic look at her work, with little personal insight aside from her cold relationship with actual sex, if not its packaging. Berry's starlet is a sad soul, smiling with tears in her eyes during dance numbers as she watches her lover leave, filling up nightclubs where they ask her to relieve herself in a Dixie cup. These are important aspects of her experience, but it's not the entire show.

The script can also be ham-handed. On Dandridge's first date with Nicolas, they exchange a "Can You Top That?" version of poverty tales. My family was so poor we slept four to a bed, she says. Oh, yeah? Well, my family was so poor we had to sew our own costumes . . . and on it goes.

But there are moments of poignancy: Flush from the success of "Carmen Jones," Dandridge becomes the first guest at Las Vegas' Last Frontier Hotel. She gets a suite, but can't use the public facilities, including the pool. In a defiant act, Berry's Dandridge dips a toe in the pool and, laughing bitterly, splashes the water. "I hope you're happy," the hotel manager says to her with a grim look.

"No," she says, her grin fading. "I'm not happy at all." The immense pool is drained and scrubbed by hand - by three black janitors.

Even with all it leaves out, "Introducing Dorothy Dandridge" is beautiful to look at. The costumes and set are as entrancing to the eye as Berry is as her silver-screen idol. As much as the story mows over much of the star's life without bringing out her true persona, at least the plot moves along quickly. It's just that you can't help wishing that this introduction had more of a chance of leading to a solid relationship.