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Otto Preminger needed persuading that demure Dorothy could be the heartbreaking Carmen. But there she stands, hands on svelte hips, unleashing a wonderfully womanly laugh and dazzling the hapless Joe (Harry Belafonte) by sitting down and slinging his leg over her shoulder or urging him to dry her toenails: "Blow on 'em, Sugar." Here was an adult sexuality Hollywood had rarely shown. It surfaces again in the French Tamango (1957), where Dandridge--as Aiche, the half-caste slave mistress of captain Curt Jurgens--summons a complex ferocity, connecting with Aiche's hurt as well as her love-hatred of the man who owns her.
Dorothy's sex life was just as stormy. Her first husband, Harold Nicholas of the dance team, was absent and faithless; their daughter Lynn was brain damaged and had to be institutionalized. Her second marriage, to Las Vegas sharpie Jack Denison, yanked her into bankruptcy. Her trysts with Preminger, Jurgens, Peter Lawford and others left her forlorn. Her nightclub career dipped; after Porgy and Bess (1959), good film offers dried up. Dorothy was yesterday's darling.
Luck is often a matter of timing. Dandridge was pretty and gifted at the right time; that gave her a taste of stardom. But she aspired to it the old way--by being a dignified actress, a chanteuse, a lady--at just the time when pop culture was busting into rowdiness. Bogle says she was "the beauty as loner." That isolation may have scuttled her. Now it makes her a heroine, a nostalgia pinup and a source for the kind of movie role Dorothy Dandridge was rarely lucky enough to play.