His mustache is slightly thicker than Clark Gable's, his smile is even more dazzling, and he sees the possibilities. "Clark Gable is the apex," says Actor Billy Dee Williams. "A star is what everyone wants to be, even Presidents."
At 39, Williams looks more and more like Hollywood's first black matinee idol. Each week he receives nearly 8,000 letters, mostly from women—white and black—who love his almost boyish good looks and sloping fullback's shoulders. In Savannah, Ga., last summer the tactical police were called upon to cool the ardor of female fans who threw themselves and their phone numbers at Williams during the filming of The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings, a surprise summer hit about the black baseball leagues of the 1930s. Says Sidney Furie, who directed Williams in the 1972 hit Lady Sings the Blues: "He has the greatest magnetism of any actor on the screen."
Billy Dee's fortunes have risen rapidly in the past five years, since Motown Records Mogul Berry Gordy became his manager and teamed him with another Gordy protegee, Diana Ross.
Gordy, a shrewd judge of white audiences, was launching himself as a movie director. His two films, Mahogany and Lady Sings the Blues, were about blacks, but not about high-pitched racial antagonisms. They were glamorous, glossily turned out and entertaining rather than threatening. Their success has helped to broaden Williams' popularity with white audiences.
Although Billy Dee is robustly masculine, his touch is as light as Comedian Bill Cosby's; he has avoided the angry black-stud typecasting that has shackled Jim Brown and Fred Williamson. "I always keep Jimmy Cagney in mind," says Williams.
"Whatever meanness he'd show on the screen, audiences still liked him because they knew instinctively that he was a nice guy. I think they have that feeling about me."
Manager Gordy is planning to cross racial lines with his nice guy by casting him opposite such actresses as Faye Dunaway and Barbra Streisand. Says Williams: "I would like to do a romantic film with a woman of another color, but it would have to be tastefully done."
He is not spending all his efforts on launching his career as a matinee idol. Earlier this year, in Washington. D.C., he portrayed Martin Luther King Jr. in Josh Greenfeld's play I Have a Dream. He is currently working on a Universal back lot, playing the part of Black Composer Scott Joplin for an NBC special this fall. His mustache shorn, his hair slickly marcelled, Billy Dee sits before a dummy piano, miming perfect syncopation to Joplin's ragtime. Suddenly, on cue, he is distracted by the arrival of a lovely onlooker (Black Actress Margaret A very). Their eyes meet. The girl tries to feign disinterest, but she's hooked.