A Star Has Died: Carmen de Lavallade (1931-2025)

 To my surprise, there’s been no mention of the passing of dancer Carmen de Lavallade in my hometown paper, The Los Angeles Times. Carmen died, in the waning days of 2025, in a New Jersey hospital, and east coast news outlets paid her glowing tributes. But I’m still shocked that her death, at age 94, was apparently ignored in L.A. After all, Carmen was born in Los Angeles, and—as a teenager—began her serious dance training after winning a scholarship to Lester Horton’s landmark Dance Theater in West Hollywood. Quickly becoming a star of the Horton troupe, she took on such fiercely dramatic roles as Salomé, while also teaching small kids like me the basics of modern dance.

                                                     Me at age 4, with my beloved teacher  

 Still in her early twenties, Carmen set out for the Big Apple, along with her close friend, future choreographer Alvin Ailey. Both soon found work in a 1954 Broadway production of House of Flowers, a fanciful Haiti-set musical that was an unlikely collaboration between Truman Capote and Harold Arlen. It was there that Carmen met and married Trinidad-born Geoffrey Holder, who later triumphed on Broadway with The Wiz: he would win Tonys both for directing the show and for contributing its lively costume design.     

 Now based in New York, Carmen continued on as a dancer, featured in Ailey’s American Dance Theater productions and guesting with other companies. Eventually she began teaching stage movement at the celebrated Yale School of Drama, where a young Meryl Streep was one of her students. When Carmen and I met for lunch in New York ten years ago (see photo above from that memorable afternoon) she reminisced about appearing in the premiere production of Stephen Sondheim’s The Frogs, imaginatively staged in the Yale swimming pool.

 Blessed with a beautiful face and a long slim body, Carmen was undeniably well-suited to movies too. This began back in her Lester Horton days, when she was cast in the 1954 screen adaptation of Carmen Jones, the Broadway hit that adapted Bizet’s Carmen to an African-American cast. If  you watch one of the big musical numbers, set in a local bar during World War II,  you’ll see a young Carmen, her long pony-tail swinging as she dances exuberantly to “Beat Out the Rhythm of the Drum.”  In 1959, she revealed her acting chops in a tense scene from a crime drama, Odds Against Tomorrow, wherein she played the tough-minded girlfriend of star Harry Belafonte. Almost forty years later, she was featured in John Sayles’ Texas drama, Lone Star.

 In the course of a long career, Carmen received many accolades, including a Kennedy Center honor in 2017. But I can’t help remembering a story my parents told me when I was a kid. In the 1950s, Carmem was appearing with two male dancers as an opening act for Pearl Bailey at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, and my folks drove from L.A. to see her perform. Carmen’s name blazed forth on the marquee, and she danced nightly in an opulent show room for appreciative crowds. But Carmen was not allowed to lodge at the Flamingo. Her café au lait coloring meant she was stuck all day in a stuffy motel room, without access to the swimming pool and other amenities that made the Flamingo a world-class resort. So my parents gave up fun in the sun to spend their weekend keeping her company. When they got home, they told me all about it. It made no sense to me then . . .  and it still doesn’t. But I learned once more that the world outside of Lester Horton’s Dance Theater was not always a graceful place.

 

Get Him To the Greek: Harry Belafonte and Other Al Fresco Stars

Last weekend I toured Griffith Park’s venerable Greek Theatre, courtesy of the good folks at the L.A. Conservancy. Opened in 1931, with a mandate to bring culture to Angelenos, this outdoor venue now boasts 5780 seats. This makes it a small cousin to the colossal Hollywood Bowl, which seats some 17,500 music-lovers. We toured the stage, much changed from its early days, as well as the hallways where some famous acts of recent years have left their mark. And, in the distance, we spotted the hills where so-called “tree people” used to enjoy free access to the entertainment.  

These days, the Greek is primarily a pop music venue. It has also been featured in movies, like 2010’s Get Him to the Greek, a goofy Judd Apatow-produced comedy featuring Russell Brand as a free-spirited rock star and Jonah Hill as the recorder exec pressed into service as his chaperone. For the 2018 version of A Star is Born, the Greek was the stage on which Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper performed the Oscar-winning “Shallow.”   

But I remember the Greek in a different mood. No, I don’t date back to the time when troops of ersatz classical nymphs frolicked on stage for the delight of theatregoers. But in the era (1952-1975) when impresario James A. Doolittle booked acts, I was taken by my parents to see some very classy entertainments from far-flung places. Here’s what I remember: Britain’s venerable D’Oyly Carte company performing Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore. The Grand Kabuki from Japan. The National Theatre of Britain staging an Elizabethan-style all-male production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It. The Comédie Française presenting Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme in French, which was a very nice pay-off for my years of high school français. (My mother pointed out Maurice Chevalier in the audience.)

But I mainly associate the Greek Theater with the bi-annual summer visits by Harry Belafonte in his prime. His show, featuring singers, dancers, and a small group of musicians, was always a fabulous spectacle. He even followed up his best-selling Belafonte at Carnegie Hall live album with Belafonte at the Greek. My mother was such a fan that she saw each of his shows twice, once with my father and once with my younger sister and me. One year, when we arrived early, she’d scouted out the underground lot where headliners parked their cars. She stationed us near the exit, just in time to see the great man himself emerge. We chatted briefly, and he complimented me on the party dress I was wearing. Proudly I told him, “My mother bought it on sale.” (Behind me, Mom turned beet red.) 

Belafonte, as I was to learn over the years, had many talents. In early films like Carmen Jones, which didn’t always require him to sing, he was a handsome leading man, engaged in thwarted romances and dangerous doings. Later, teaming with longtime pal Sidney Poitier who also directed, he did a nifty Brando-as-the-Godfather imitation in a ghetto crime comedy called Uptown Saturday Night (1974). In his last film, 2018’s Blackkklansman, he performed for Spike Lee as an ageing activist, a role that meshed nicely with the passions that animated his private life. To my surprise, he gets little recognition at Washington’s National Museum of African-American History and Culture. Though, in the section of the museum dedicated to entertainers, the cover of his Calypso album can be found, there’s no display case dedicated to his career. But a  fiery Belafonte quote is on display at the museum connected with the Statue of Liberty: “Bring it on. Dissent is central to any democracy.” 

 

A Colorful Take on “Carmen”

I’ve been wanting to write about Carmen Jones, and the death of Olga James at age 95 gives me a good (though sad) excuse. Though I saw this film only recently, I’ve been aware of it for many years. My parents, who prided themselves on being open-minded, admired the special flair of Black entertainers like Lena Horne, Pearl Bailey, and Harry Belafonte. Their passion for the whimsical 1943 all-Black fantasy-film, Cabin in the Sky (starring Ethel Waters and Eddie “Rochester” Anderson) transferred to me, and I love watching it to this day, regarding it as essential comfort-cinema. When Carmen Jones made its screen debut (following a hyper-successful Broadway run) in 1954, I was much too young to see it. But now that I have, I can understand my parents’ enthusiasm. This despite the fact that the two lead performers, both well-known professional singers with movie-star looks and credentials, were dubbed by more operatic voices.

Admittedly, the score of Carmen Jones is not an easy one to sing. It is, at base, Georges Bizet’s Carmen, transferred by lyricist and scenarist Oscar Hammerstein II from the streets and bull-rings of Spain to a small military town in North Carolina, midway through World War II. Carmen, still a seductive vixen, now works in a parachute factory; the  opera’s Don José has become the clean-cut “flyboy” Joe, who’s bound for officer candidate school. The glamorous toreador of the opera has turned into a champion prizefighter, Husky Miller, who whisks Carmen off to Chicago and decks her out in diamonds and furs. Though the language of the songs is contemporary, the score is still highly operatic in nature. I’m told it was a then-unknown Marilyn Horne who supplied star Dorothy Dandridge’s singing voice for the film. The handsome, good-natured Joe, who fails to resist Carmen’s seductive moves on him, is appealingly played by Belafonte, but he (or rather his vocal substitute) is hardly singing calypso .Naturally, there’s a tragic ending.

Before today I had never heard of Olga James, and was wholly unaware of her showbiz career. But a photo that accompanied her obituary in the Hollywood Reporter quickly brought her back to me. For the film version of Carmen Jones James was cast as Cindy Lou (think Micaëla), the sweet country girl whom Joe is planning to marry before Carmen gets her hooks into him. James, who hailed from a showbiz family, trained at Juilliard for a career in classical music, and so she was well equipped to sing arias like “My Joe” and the mournful “He Got His Self Another Woman.” She does so beautifully and poignantly; of all the tragedies in the story, hers is doubtless the saddest, because she does everything right but still loses out on love. (Interesting sidenote: James was married to jazz sax great Cannonball Adderley until his death at age 45.)   

The notion of a Hollywood musical with an all-Black cast is of course something out of a very different era. (Similarly, musicals in which the entire cast is white now seem hugely retrograde.) Though I’m hardly a fan of segregation on movie screens or anywhere else, I remain glad that talented Black performers of earlier eras got to show what they could do, and weren’t always stuck in supporting roles as cheery Pullman porters and feisty kitchen help. One other sidenote: African-American dancers who lived near Hollywood could count on occasional movie work in musicals like this one. In the film’s big dance scene, I love spotting Carmen de Lavallade, my very first dance teacher, and later a major star of the American dance world. 

 

A Jamaica Farewell to Harry Belafonte

My mother considered herself the #1 fan of singer/actor/activist Harry Belafonte, who has just died at the age of 96. All of her adult life she adored Belafonte’s singing, his acting, his political stances, and his dusky good looks. And, of course, she passed on this passion to her children.

 There was a time when Belafonte regularly brought his electrifying stage show, complete with backup singers and dancers,  to L.A.’s outdoor Greek Theatre. When the dates were announced, my mother would quickly order two sets of tickets. On one night she’d attend with my father. On another, she’d bring my young sister and me to see the great man in person. I mean this literally—one year she figured out where the entertainers parked their cars, and stationed the three of us where we’d be sure to meet her hero. It worked. Belafonte emerged, and graciously greeted the dressed-up little girls. (He had some of his own at home, so he knew how to talk to kids.) When he complimented me on my pretty dress, I proudly explained that my mother had bought it on sale. It became a family story that was told many times over. Years later, he was equally ingratiating when I (then a young journalist) met him at a record industry luncheon. Someone snapped a photo, which you can see below. It became a prominent feature of my mother’s kitchen bulletin board.

 Belafonte studied acting before he became known as a singer of calypso tunes. One of his earliest films, Carmen Jones (1954), was a musical in which he didn’t get to sing a note. This  all-Black version of Bizet’s Carmen,  adapted from a hit Broadway show, required operatic warbling, and both he and star Dorothy Dandridge were dubbed. Later in the decade, he starred in screen dramas that always had a racial element at their core. A Caribbean-set political and romantic drama, Island in the Sun,  allowed him to bare his torso on-screen and to romance—with serious consequences—the very blonde Joan Fontaine.

 The Belafonte film from the 1950s that I remember best is an imaginative apocalyptic story called The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959). It’s set in Manhattan, in the aftermath of some sort of nuclear disaster that has rid the city of virtually all its inhabitants. The only survivors in this New York ghost town seem to be Belafonte (a mine inspector who was deep underground at the time of the blast), a pretty young Caucasian woman played by Inger Stevens, and a crusty older sailor (Mel Ferrer). What we’ve got here, as the survival of the human race seems in question, is a potential love triangle with strong racial overtones. The film was the first offering of Belafonte’s own production company, dedicated to portraying the African-American experience on-screen.

 In later years, as he began to emphasize social activism over acting, Belafonte took on fewer film roles, though he did appear in movies directed by his close friend, Sidney Poitier. These included 1972’s Buck and the Preacher and the 1974 comedy Uptown Saturday Night, in which his crime-boss character, Geechy Dan, is a wicked send-up of Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone. As he aged, he continued to take on occasional roles in films that had personal meaning to him, like Bobby, about events surrounding the assassination of Robert Kennedy.  His last film appearance was a powerful one, in Spike Lee’s BlacKKKlansmen (2018) He was over ninety when he played for Lee a civil rights activist describing in horrific detail a Klan lynching.  May he rest in peace.

Harry Belafonte’s Reading Rainbow

Spanish-language poster for "Island in the Sun"

 I last wrote about singer, actor, and social activist Harry Belafonte on the occasion of his 90^th birthday. That celebration took place on March 1 of this year. But I’m back to Belafonte again, because he’s just received an honor worth cheering about. The 115^th Street Library in New York’s Harlem will henceforth bear his name. What makes this extra-special is the fact that Belafonte grew up in the neighborhood. He struggled with dyslexia and eventually dropped out of high school, but still thirsted for book-learning. That’s where the local library came in. It was a place where he could pursue his education on his own terms. And it was eventually in a theatre group at another Harlem public library, the noble Schomburg Center, that he developed his acting chops.

Belafonte was born in 1927. I first learned about him as a small child while taking classes at the remarkable (and remarkably multi-ethnic) Lester Horton Dance Theater in West Hollywood. His first album was often on the turntable, and I grew to love his way with gentle and humorous American folk ballads. That was 1954, and I doubt his Mark Twain and Other Folk Favorites sold many copies. But two years later he was earning gold records for introducing the American public to calypso rhythms. Suddenly the whole country was shaking its hips to a Caribbean beat. The hit albums kept coming, and when a Belafonte ensemble showed up at L.A.’s Greek Theatre or New York’s Carnegie Hall, you were assured of an evening full of song, dance, humor, and a soupçon of social consciousness.

 

What was the best thing about Harry Belafonte? He had a warm, strong voice; a supple body; an impish sense of humor; a keen knowledge of showmanship. But beyond all that, he was so electrifyingly handsome that the ladies in the audience were swept away. Take my mother, the ultimate Belafonte fan. When he performed in Los Angeles, she bought tickets months in advance. When he brought his act to Las Vegas, she was there. Fortunately, my father tolerated her obsession. He might not have been quite as rapturous about the man’s sex appeal, but he enjoyed Belafonte too. 

So you can imagine my childhood. When Belafonte was in town, normal household routine came to a standstill. My mother and father would see a performance; then she’d return with me and my little sister. One year, when I was ten, we really had it down to a science. The three of us arrived early and scouted out the spot where the star would arrive. When he got out of his car, there were two little girls waiting with autograph books and big smiles. He politely commented on my dress, at which I proudly announced that my mom had bought it on sale. I don’t have a snapshop of that moment, but years later—at a press luncheon—someone snapped an excellent photo of Belafonte and a college-age me. My mom immediately posted it on the family bulletin board. Occasionally I got covered over by more recent images, but Belafonte’s radiant smile was on full display in the house as long as my mom was alive.    

     

Belafonte of course was far more than a singer. He did well in a number of acting roles, but largely abandoned Hollywood in order to stump for civil rights and other social causes. I confess I never thought of him in conjunction with libraries. But since books have always been my own magic carpet, I’m thrilled that this idol of my youth will now be associated with the written word.

   

I'm the one on the left.

 

Roger Corman and Harry Belafonte: Going into their Nineties with Style

On the Hollywood front, this week’s big story involves the release of Going in Style. The comedy -- an updating of  a 1979 flick that featured George Burns, Art Carney, and Lee Strasberg – involves three senior citizens who scheme to rob the bank that mishandled their pensions. In the new version, the leading roles are played by movie veterans Michael Caine (age 84), Alan Arkin (83), and Morgan Freeman, who will celebrate his 80^th birthday in June. Also involved is one-time bombshell Ann-Margret, who turns 76 this month. The tag line says it all: “You’re never too old to get even.”

As someone who’s getting older myself, I’m always pleased to see attention being paid to performers who are hardly spring chickens. In a society that applauds youth, it’s heartening that oldsters too sometimes get allotted juicy roles. But while saluting the still-impressive talents of octogenarians Caine, Arkin, and Freeman, I also want to recognize two nonagenarians who continue to make a difference within the entertainment industry. They are very different from one another, but both are alike in not wanting to be put out to pasture anytime soon. 

My former boss, B-movie maven Roger Corman, turns 91 tomorrow, April 5. Roger is well known within the film industry for directing 50 low-budget films (including such classics as House of Usher and The Little Shop of Horrors). He is also revered for giving a leg up to some of the industry’s best and brightest, including directorial aces Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Peter Bogdanovich, Ron Howard,  and James Cameron. The honorary Oscar Roger accepted in 2009 is testament to the fact that, despite his years as an indie maverick, he’s now regarded as a Hollywood elder statesman. But this hardly means that Roger’s ready for a rocking chair. His tiny company still churns out outrageous creature-features (like 2014’s made-for-TV Sharktopus vs. Pteracuda and the upcoming Cobragator). And he’s also revisiting old glories with remakes of such one-time hits as Death Race 2000 (now Death Race 2050) and Piranha (soon to be called Piranha JPN). I’ve just read that my old Concorde-New Horizons pal Katt Shea has been hired to direct a remake of her Dance of the Damned, which will apparently be retitled Dance with a Vampyre. At this stage of his career, Roger gets few points for originality. But, hey, he’s still functioning. Happy birthday, Roger! May you live long and continue to prosper!

Then there’s my mom’s favorite heart-throb, Harry Belafonte, who entered his nineties on March 1 of this year. Back in the day, of course, Belafonte was known for his calypso crooning and for the open-necked shirts that revealed his buff physique. He did well in some acting roles (see, for instance, Odds Against Tomorrow) but spent most of his time touring with his well-polished concert act, when not actively campaigning for civil rights in the company of such leaders as Dr. Martin Luther King. Today he no longer has hair on his head, and it’s been years since I’ve heard him sing, but he continues to make waves as a dedicated champion of the oppressed in every corner of the globe. His best role, it seems, remains that of a voice for the voiceless, and it’s wonderful to think that advanced age isn’t slowing him down. In 2015 Belafonte was honored with the Academy’s  Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award: it’s hard to think of anyone who has deserved it more.

You’re never too old to get even? Roger Corman and Harry Belafonte prove that you’re never too old to continue doing what you love.