Bio-Musicals: Interrupted Melodies

Hollywood also plans big things for Josephine Baker and Libby Holman, two heartbreak divas who rose to glory in the '20s. Since the mid-΄70s, Baker (who escaped St. Louis shantytowns to dazzle Jazz Age Parisians with her naked shimmying as a Folies-Bergère sensation) has inspired such producers as Lord Lew Grade, Carlo Ponti, and Allan Carr to think marabou, bangles, and sequins. Awarded the Legion of Honor for Resistance work, Baker later survived Red-baiting by columnist Walter Winchell and, although she was lionized by worldwide concert audiences in autumn years, wound up homeless with twelve adopted orphan children. "What a story," as Thelma Ritter put it in All About Eve, "everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end."

The year before Baker's death in 1975, Sir Lew Grade announced he would star Diahann Carroll in a Baker bio-pic. Grade's partners, agents Hank Kaufman and Gene Lerner (dealmakers for Bette Davis vs. Joan Crawford in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane), had extracted rights and clearances from Jo Bouillon, Baker's husband, and her adopted offspring.

The publication within a year of each other of two Baker books sparked competition for a Baker musical. In 1979, producer Alan Carr joined with Grade, Kaufman and Lerner to film Boullion's biography Josephine and, despite contradictory evidence supplied by Mahogany and The Wiz, Carr gushed to the press that Diana Ross, "the only logical successor to Josephine Baker's crown of glamour and spectacle," would star. Meanwhile, producer Edward S. Shaw bought Stephen Papich's Remembering Josephine as the basis for a $10 million rival bio-musical, to which were reportedly attached Diahnne Abbot and Robert De Niro, then-married co-stars of New York, New York. Angry Shaw vs. Lerner-Kaufman letters kept lawyers on red alert.

Diana (call her Miss) Ross may have hoped to cut out the middlemen by optioning Naked at the Feast, yet another Baker book, by Lynn Haney. Over the years, while the project was on and off more often than a Beatles reunion, the press intimated that Ross and Paramount, her producing studio, were at odds over creative control. Meanwhile, Ross hired screenwriters, considered such directors as Franco Zeffirelli, and picked the brains of fashion maven Diana Vreeland.

As late as last year, never-say-die Ross fantasized about wowing her fans in a $20 million Baker extravaganza, decked out not only in Dior and Balenciaga knockoffs but also less formally. "If there's an artistic way to be nude and beautiful," the 45-year-old songbird mused about her dream project to an interviewer, "I would certainly consider it because that's part of being who Josephine Baker was." Although we discount rumors that a sequence in the Ross script stages Baker's signature tune, "J'ai Deux Amours," as a hand-holding concert audience sing-along, shouldn't actresses limit themselves to trashing one legend per lifetime?

Anyway, Ross better watch her back because HBO is shooting a cradle-to-grave pay-TV saga called "Josephine Baker," from the unlikely producer-director-writer team of HBO's "Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story." Co-executive producer Robert Halmi says, "Josephine's story encompasses much of our historical and political maturity, in a life story that's both entertaining and a morality play." This serious viewpoint suggests that the budget will not go haywire on costly ostrich feathers, anyway. Playing Josephine Baker is not Irene Cara or Holly Robinson--considered front runners for the role--but one Lynn Whitfield, who you may remember from "The Women of Brewster Place." (Then again...) With this biopic underway, don't be surprised if another Baker movie gets going, and soon. Dueling showbiz flicks in the past have included two movies each about Frances Farmer, Jean Harlow, Liberace, and Dorothy Stratten.

So Orion may well green-light for production this summer a feature on Baker's early years based on Jazz Cleopatra by Phyllis Rose, published last year. "Our project," says Howard Rosenman of Sandollar, one of five co-producers of that epic, "focuses on Josephine taking Paris by storm, meeting an Italian nobleman and [nightclub queen] Bricktop, who fight for her soul and body, and on the politicization of a girl who had to leave America to become a star." The screenplay, by George (_The Colored Museum_) Wolfe, will be entrusted to Hugh Hudson, the guiding hand of Revolution and Lost Angels. (Just who we would choose.)

To date, perky Whitney Houston balked at the nudity entailed, so the project's backers say they may consider unknowns, or pop star Neneh Cherry might modify her buffalo stance for Baker's outrageous Banana Dance. A "big black star" will play Bricktop (big as in Tina, Whoopi, or Oprah?) and, to play the Italian lothario dubbed by Bricktop "the no-account count," we are promised "a major male star." And remember, George Hamilton does not count.

While folks have been competing to make the first Baker movie, Ray Stark--king of such latter-day bio-musicals as funny Girl and funny Lady--has harbored an obsession with filming the tempestuous life of Libby Holman. Holman, who torched Broadway with renditions of "Moanin' Low" and "Body and Soul," forsook the footlights (and, allegedly, such lovers as stage great Jeanne Eagels) to marry tobacco heir Zachary Smith Reynolds, who, eight months later, died of gunshot wounds in the wee small hours after one of his and Libby's notorious parties. After murder charges against Holman and her husband's strapping, constant companion were dropped, Holman stoked her notoriety by braving a comeback and dragging her famous in-laws through courts to win a $6 million trust fund for her son. An acerbic, randy ruin in later years, Holman hobnobbed with Dorothy Parker, Clifton Webb, and Noel Coward, and became an intimate of Montgomery Clift before she died at 65.

In 1977, Ray Stark announced his intention to buy for filming Jon Bradshaw's Holman biography Dreams That Money Can Buy (which was not published until 1985). Some say Stark saw the project as a reunion with his Funny Girl/_Lady_ star Barbara Streisand--certainly at the time she was ideal casting. Stark hired Gore Vidal to script the singer's life, and set Herbert Ross to direct. "Of course," Vidal was quoted as saying at the time, "everyone wants to know, did she kill him or didn't she?" Vidal believed she had shot her husband. "Delighted" by Vidal's screenplay, Stark reportedly settled on moist eyed Jill Clayburgh to play Sweet Libby, which was announced for a 1981 start date.

In 1980, producers Paul Picard and William Woodfield announced preproduction on a Warner Bros. project based on Libby, a biography by Milt Macklin which might have starred Cher--or Sally Field--had it ever gotten off the ground. Bloodied but unbowed, Stark, in 1981, set to work Frederic Raphael (_Darling_, Glittering Prizes) on another script draft, succeeded, two years later, by a new attempt by Richard Kramer ("Kent State," a telefilm). Stark annexed director Karel Reisz (_Isadora_, Sweet Dreams), and Debra Winger emerged as a shoo-in for the hellcat Holman role.

In 1985, a year later, Reisz had been succeeded by James Bridges, Winger's Urban Cowboy and Mike's Murder director. Eventually Debra Winger and Bridges, too, moved on and, by early 1986, Madonna was reportedly set to tackle Libby. More recently, Demi Moore and director Richard Pearce (_Country_) were mentioned for the project but, according to producer Marykay Powell, Stark is awaiting a new screenplay from Diana Hammond (_Princess Daisy_) before making any further moves. "What Libby needs is Strindberg," says a former associate of the project, "what Libby has is Ray Stark."

That's not all, folks--also in preproduction are bio-musicals about such rock legends as Little Richard, Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, and Roy Orbison (perhaps to be played by Martin Sheen). What, no Four Freshman movie? Touchstone is developing I, Tina: The Tina Turner Story, with Howard (_Little Shop of Horrors_, Little Mermaid) Ashman writing the saga of the funky-rock-star-turned-Plymouth-shill. At Hollywood Pictures, producers Neil Meron and Craig Zadan are developing two unlikely "and-then-I-wrote" bio-musicals, Rodgers and Hart, and Rodgers and Hammerstein. Guess they're sure there's a movie in composer Richard Rodgers's life, somewhere. Then, there is Bette (Born for Bio-Musicals) Midler's project at Touchstone about all-gal band leader of the '40s, Ina Ray Hutton, and another, at Tri-Star, in which Midler would emote for Meron and Zadan as cabaret-musical legend Lotte Lenya, a.k.a. Mrs. Kurt Weill. Toney, too, is Martin Scorsese's long-promised Gershwin project from a Paul Schrader screenplay, and the two all-singing, all-tapping Bill "Bojangles" Robinson movies, planned by independent producers--one starring Ben Vereen, who knows a thing or two about tap dancing, but the other starring jazz singer Scotty Wright, of all people. Resin up those violin strings, boys, and break out the pink-and-amber gels.

________

Charles Oakley, born in Santa Rosa, writes occasionally on the music scene, but prefers working with his hands.

Pages: 1 2