Bogle is probably the expert on African-Americans in Hollywood, with a number of excellent books. I thought he would have gone over all the ground already but no, there is plenty new here in another excellent book, an overall history of blacks in Hollywood, with a focus on the achievers - not just people like Dorothy Dandridge and Stepin Fetchit but Noble Johnson the first black star, Madame Sul-Te-Wan the never-day-day old actor, and Clarence Muse the grand old man plus architects and lawyers prominent in the community, and Phil Moore, a leading composer at MGM, and the choreographer Marie Bryan. He also places emphasis on people's wives in the black community, such as Nat King Cole's wife and Fraya Nicholas' wife, plus black suburbs and hotels. He stays away from people who were more visitors to LA from the coast like Paul Robeson and Sidney Poitier, concentrating more on the ones who lived there. I found it particularly interesting the stuff about the black nightclub scene, which really jumped, and the role of status within the black community. Bogle writes about what blacks achieved not what they didn't achieve - and as a result instead of reading about marginalised people for whom it was all too hard and poor them he creates a living vibrant sketch of a real community. (One that inevitably disappeared with civil rights - there are still black communities but not the cohesive ones they had before). Bogle gives them humanity: Madame Sul-Te-Wan who never stopped thinking there was stardom arond the corner, James Edwards for whom it was all too hard, smart as a whip Geri Nicholas (the women on the whole seemed to turn out better than the men). It doesn't mention Tallulah Bankhead's supposed lesbian affair with Hattie McDaniel, which I would have thought too good to miss whether verifiable or not (hey it was in Hollywood Babylon isn't that enough).
A thought - one of the things that kept blacks back was they lacked a steady money making genre. Just like female star power in Hollywood declined in the 70s and 80s when the stopped making traditional female star genres such as melodramas, romantic comedies and musicals - black stars lacked a consistent genre in which studios would put them - apart from being maids and so on. I think more low budget musicals would have been the way to go, like Stormy Weather - surely they would have turned a profit and they would have had the talent.
One thing, though: Bogle does spend a bit too much time on Dorothy Dandridge. I know the power of her myth among female black stars and Bogle wrote her bio and all that but at the end of the day she only starred in two films and doesn't quite deserve the space she gets here, esp with people going on about how hot she was. Methinks Bogle had a bit of a crush.
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