Everything and Nothing

Like Lena Home, whose beauty and singing style she approximated, Dorothy Dandridge had no desire to be a symbol. But she did want to equalize the racial barrier and since, as someone said, she looked like "the dream of integration," marry one of the many white men who loved her or just boffed her (among them, Peter Lawford, Otto Preminger) and escaped her. She died according to Conrad not as a suicide. . . "it was a murder that took a lifetime" and which began with an absentee father. . . continued with a repressive surrogate aunt during the days when she and her sister sang on the Black Belt circuit. . . ended phase one when she married one of the Nicholas Brothers co-appearing at the Cotton Club. Before the week was over he found better bedmates and she went on alone with the brain-damaged child of the eventually broken marriage. On and on it goes, and for a time up and up she went (her star role in Carmen Jones); but eventually broke (a patsy for a cheap "saloon" manager and in an oil well deal), she spent the last year on champagne and pills which brought down the curtain. . . . A sad, inevitably involving, story singing more than the blues and representing a world of dereliction and failure, some of it misguidedly self-inflicted. (Kirkus Reviews)