Billy Dee Williams: The Radical Glimmer of Our Greatest Matinee Idol (part 1)
by Dennis Leroy Kangalee
Photograph by Aaron Richter for Esquire, 2019
I remember when I was a boy in 1984 watching an episode of the Jefferson’s in which Billy Dee Williams guest starred. Florence, the cheeky maid played by Marla Gibbs, had an enormous crush on Billy Dee Williams – as did my babysitter. I couldn’t stand my sitter and had once locked her in the closet cause she had always insisted that Lando Calrissian betrayed Han Solo (this was torment to a young boy who wanted to be both Han and Lando. What would DuBois say about that?) but I’ll never forget what she said watching Williams on the screen as she was ironing: “Mmm…that sound.” Of course, she meant his voice.
Smooth. Warm. Like hot chocolate running through a cavern. His soft baritone had edges with a treble effect where, if you listened closely, you can hear a distinct reverb when he hits his tone endings or certain consonants.
That voice, remarkably in any age and by any standard, often went under-utilized by filmmakers.
His classical face, always rendered by the emotions of his eyes (as opposed to the contours of his features – clowns for examples are more apt to lead with their nose, mouths, or eyebrows) could imbue empathy, mystery, a flirtatious spark that morph into disappointment and contention, a robust but gentle rage always simmering…
This is Billy Dee Williams, born in 1937, NYC, son of a West Indian elevator operator who always wanted to be in show business and encouraged her son’s artistic interests. Billy Dee Williams: debonaire extraordinaire, the last of a tribe, the first of a more complex Black leading man in Hollywood, and a distinguished individual who has traversed the arts like a mountain climber.
RISE OF A RADICAL
“…You realize more and more that you’re different because you’re not part of the European Western value system and it becomes rather frustrating and difficult for you. So, I think that contributed to a kind of hostility that was creeping in to my…system.”
Different poster designs for the 1971 “political arthouse action-movie” The Final Comedown
Passionate about all the arts in his late teens, Williams gave himself over to acting while maintaining his painting on the side. He had his rite of passage in the theater, but always had his eye on movies; he appeared with Joan Plowright in A Taste of Honey (a highly successful, but trite British kitchen-sink drama somewhat controversial for its time, he plays the sailor, Jimmy, who wants to marry Plowright once she gets pregnant) he studied at the Harlem Actors Workshop with Paul Mann, a blacklisted actor who, despite having been punished for his left-wing views under McCarthy, set up workshops and classes for actors of all kinds in the dark-days of the late 1950’s.
Billy Dee Williams’ screen presence upped the ante for Black men in the 1970’s and gave the standard leading man a run for his money – as there was acumen and self-awareness and confidence that he had that might amount to swagger to some or downright arrogance to others (a conundrum for West Indians, as Godfrey Cambridge used to say, “I’m not arrogant, I’m just West Indian.”).
His physical radicalism caught up to his ideological radicalism a couple of years into his celebrity. He’s buttoned up in Brian’s Song, which worked for the interpretation of the character - Chicago Bears’ football player Gayle Sayers - but his relationship to his body slowly comes into being (note how Williams played athletes in different points of his career) despite how awkward he (Gayle?) sometimes moves. James Caan, as Piccolo, Sayers’ best friend who dies from cancer, tells Sayers: “You’ve got some moves but in the locker room you’re one big klutz.”
At the end of Brian’s Song, Williams turns away to hug his wife when Piccolo says his final lines on his deathbed (“I’ll see you tomorrow.”). There’s a flash of what Billy Dee Williams the Icon will be in his neck; the shot of him turning-- his body language – that stays throughout his entire career. It tantalizes in his next picture. And a year later, it is so refined and honed – he covets an Academy Award nomination. *
the Billy Dee ‘neck’
Williams’ performances onward from Lady Sings the Blues and the Empire Strikes Back are legendary, his TV role as the music mogul on ABC’s “Dynasty” is glamorous (he loves melodrama), his Colt 45 commercials cements his urbane GQ image. His cool jazz style (Miles Davis asked him once who did his hair when they met at the White House) fluctuating between 1930’s gangster, slick card-shark, and dapper daredevil, the man Hugh Hefner probably always wished he could have been.
The movie The Sting would have been a perfect vehicle for someone like Billy Dee Williams; he did play the composer of The Sting’s theme song (“The Entertainer”) Scott Joplin, in a TV movie however in a moving performance and one of his best. His knack for intelligent comedy was highlighted in 1976’s Bingo Long’s Traveling All-Stars – a delightful movie purely for its celebration of the Negro League-era baseball players and the jocularity between Williams, Richard Pryor and James Earl Jones. Williams claims he nearly threw out his arm playing Bingo, the team leader and their pitcher (he modeled his form after Bob Gibson), and this fun movie was something Williams wished he could have done more of. His reunion on screen with Diana Ross in Mahogany was unexceptional but like Lady – a massive “Black family cult film.” In New York alone it played 24 hours a day!
Billy Dee Williams as Louis McKay in “Lady Sings the Blues” (Paramount Pictures)
By this time Williams wanted fantasy and glamour, the two things that made him like movies to begin with. He had fond memories of watching Fred Astaire pictures when he was a child. He wanted to step away a bit from serious theatrical drama, the action genre, and certainly far away from Black exploitation pictures which, as Roger Ebert states in their 1975 interview, even though he was out of work at times – he never even considered participating in.
I don't want that Black exploitation image,” Williams told Ebert. “I look for roles that are more positive…Those exploitation movies are really very demeaning for everyone involved, including the audience.”
Writer/Director Oscar Williams did in fact go on to make exploitation pictures after his remarkable 1971 blistering art-film The Final Comedown, inspired by Jimmy Garrett’s 1967 Black Arts Movement classic “We Own the Night,” which boasted, arguably, Billy Dee’s most intense performance as Johnny, a young Black man in a West Coast ghetto who becomes a revolutionary undergoing spiritual growth, family turmoil, and ideological transformation in the racist landscape of American capitalism.
In this one movie you can see a culmination of radical influences and inspirations. He appeared with the great Paul Muni (the previous generation’s expressionistic poster boy for the socially conscious actor) in Muni’s last TV performance in “The Last Angry Man” when he was young, learning that the best actor always expresses “something about the human dilemma.” He admired Henry Fonda for this reason, a notable in James Baldwin’s own reflections on cinema and film actors. Combining this with his Stanislavski training with Paul Mann and later the political consciousness of the late sixties, everything came to fruition in a character that enabled him to emotionally roam free like a lion. The movie itself was a literal coup and one that succeeded Jules Dassin’s Uptight, Robert Kramer’s lo-fi guerrilla epic Ice, Melvin Van Peebles’ independent watershed, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, and preceded the greatest studio release of a revolutionary drama, Ivan Dixon’s The Spook Who Sat by The Door, based on the book by Sam Greenlee. It connects all those films and charts the rise and fall of a small band of Black revolutionaries who align with white radicals to initiate a literal revolution.
Comedown was dangerous in every way shape and form and Billy Dee Williams helped finance the picture himself – out of artistic desire and political necessity not out of career stratagem or radical chic. It’s because of this one film, I always wanted to ask Mr. Williams himself: “Do you agree that acting on stage or screen can be a radical act in and of itself?”
I also was always convinced that Williams had metabolized all of his feelings about the sixties in that one performance -the glimmer, gore, and goth of the fallen children surveilling peace and rainbows to the grim reapers that bookend that decade It is no shock, in retrospect, that Billy Dee Williams made the Final Comedown just three years after the assassination of Martin Luther King (whom he would play on Broadway the following decade), learning of the murder that day April, 4, 1968 on the radio alongside James Baldwin, who always appreciated Williams and once even hoped he could play Malcolm X in the screenplay he had written. Hollywood balked of course, rumored to have suggested “a darkened Charleton Heston” instead. What I would give to go back in time and be a fly on the wall of Baldwin and Williams script rendezvous that day...
Politics and human rights become cynical appropriations in Hollywood, it is not an organic relationship. Cinema and liberation could be, but Hollywood sides on the Griffith side of the fence. Samuel Goldwyn was wrong: it ain’t sending a social message that irritates the brass, it’s all about who is delivering the message. And how. (Obviously, Western Union is out of the question) Although political radicalism in the 1970’s took shape in the form of individual anti-establishment white characters rebelling on screen (Serpico, McMurphy, Woodward and Bernstein, etc.), it was never comfortable with mythologizing Black rebels or characters challenging the establishment so vociferously as Al Pacino or Jack Nicholson did.
This problem exists today. The difference now, however, is that Hollywood, Netflix, Amazon – will allow anything related to Black people or social commentary due to Black Lives Matter and the past decade’s mainstreaming of suffrage. Allowed if it is not done in a way that incurs deep belief or agitation. Everyone in corporate America will agree that racism is wrong. But start discussing revolt, self-defense, or even mild attacks on Capitalism and see what happens. The genuinely “angry” films of the seventies bordered on the agit-prop of the sixties counterculture theater, tempting the audience to applaud craft, and meaning. Its verisimilitude pulls the ideas of the characters out into the street and beyond. It’s impossible to disassociate Nicholson or Pacino from their anti-authoritarian stances in their best films. But we don’t have the kind of Movie Stars or actors we once did in mainstream cinema, regardless of race. Today, even talented performers, rarely act – they pose. They are Instagram mobiles come to life. There is a lot of imaging going on, but little experience or expression in American screen acting. So, there is no cause for concern. Disney will fund a movie about revolution because they know no one will believe in it. Fassbinder said “Give the people revolution on screen, you deny them revolution in real life.”
Comedown is also the Billy Dee Williams movie most people don’t seem to know or are afraid to remember if they are old enough to have originally seen it. A coup for a studio picture, it was patronized and dismissed by white NY Times critics and the studios pulled it as quickly as they released it. This is par for the course for Black art-films and politically “angry” films that alienate White Liberals. Hollywood had no clue what they were in for. An even more incendiary reaction would come two years later with The Spook Who Sat by The Door.
What’s telling is that Ebert never mentions the film in his interview, nor did he ever review it. This is how important works of cinema get lost or buried. I’m not blaming Ebert, but if there was anyone to come to that picture’s aid in the mainstream press it would have been him, Andrew Sarris, or Pauline Kael. Fifty years later, I was lucky to have witnessed its power through Floyd Webb’s Black World Cinema’s streaming series. Masterworks of cinema have suffered even greater turmoil, but it is telling that while we claim we “love” movies, we seldom allow ourselves to go deep into our shadows and pull out the films we would rather forget…but for all the wrong reasons.
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*An epiphany:
The mercurial radicalism of Williams’ in The Final Comedown (1971) shines through all his work, regardless of quality or aesthetic of the productions he has appeared in throughout his life. And by radical I also mean the choices he made as a performer, deviating from the norm within a script.
His movement alone on screen is a remarkable transmission of energy and moods.
This is a double-edged radicalism – where style and behavior takes over from direct political sentiments. From the strangeness of that look in his eye in Brian’s Song to the confident, yet disarming, community activist he played in Mahogany (some foolishly thought he was doing a Jesse Jackson) - proving at the height of his celebrity that he was still neighborhood, not Hollywood. His mature easy-Harlem panache eventually percolated even later stately appearance like Berry Gordy himself in the TV movie hit The Jacksons. By then the intensity and hot-fire sex appeal has marinated and settled into something not only recognizable but comforting, no longer intellectually arousing or sensually inspiring but it doesn’t have to be. There is a paternal command now that he has – all transmitted through his voice. Less is more is what Williams the later actor teaches us, the same way James Earl Jones – after his own affair with the Star Wars franchise – proved to us that a relaxed energy and gentle self-effacing humor can spill out through his voice as well (look at him, of course, in Coming to America).