4 - Dorothy Dandridge the Invisible Star: Racial Segregation in Hollywood Fan Magazines in the 1950s

Summary

In 1954 Dorothy Dandridge's career was approaching its peak. After many years playing small roles on screen and singing in theatres and clubs, she was cast as the lead in Otto Preminger's all-Black musical Carmen Jones, a role that won her an Academy Award nomination. But while she was a familiar face to readers of Black targeted magazines such as Ebony and Jet, was extensively featured in European magazines, and appeared in ‘mainstream’ US publications such as Esquire and Cosmopolitan, becoming the first Black woman to appear on the cover of the leading US photo magazine Life in November 1954, she was ignored by the US fan magazines. Donald Bogle in his substantive biography of Dandridge notes that with the release of Carmen Jones

movie magazines like Photoplay, Modern Screen and Motion Picture chose not to do features on her. Photoplay reviewed Carmen Jones […] but there were no glamorous photo layouts. No visits to the star's home. No features detailing the star's love life. (Bogle 1998, 313)

Building on Bogle's observations I will be examining how despite being set up as the first Black female Hollywood star, Dorothy Dandridge's exclusion from Hollywood fan magazines in effect rendered her invisible to a large percentage of filmgoers and thereby quashed her chances of a sustained high-profile film career. My focus will be an issue of Photoplay from February 1955, where, discretely nestled among the usual colourful content about new babies, feuding stars, happy (and not-so-happy) marriages, glamorous homes, decorative fashion and the latest film releases, is a one-page feature in black and white about Carmen Jones. By looking at this, alongside coverage of Dandridge in contemporaneous magazines, I will outline the way in which US fan magazines of the mid-1950s, a time when the civil rights movement was gaining traction, maintained a conservative and essentially racist agenda by only promoting white actors.

Dandridge

Before focusing on Photoplay I want to outline Dandridge's importance as a totemic figure. At surface level it would be easy to dismiss her as a minor Hollywood actor, in that her filmography is sparse and the films she made of variable quality.