CVK
The LA Times reviews renowned black film historian Donald Bogle’s new book Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood:

Heavyset and dark-skinned, with a beatific smile and nurturing demeanor, Louise Beavers forged a career playing domestic servants in such films as “Imitation of Life” (1934) and the 1950s TV show “Beulah.” But the real Louise Beavers lived in the tony black L.A. neighborhood of Sugar Hill, had her own maid, couldn’t cook worth a lick and enjoyed smoking, baseball and a good poker game.

“That idea that America’s favorite maid, having her own maid, not knowing anything about cooking, that just struck me,” adds Bogle. “That kind of duality. Hattie McDaniel and Louise Beavers were these ‘mammy’ types, but they had their boyfriends, their husbands; they were not these asexual figures that we associate from seeing them in films,” he says…

But Bogle’s work is also a compendium of tasty tidbits regarding interracial affairs, mixed-race social events, extravagant lifestyles (with Fetchit leading the way) and careers gone awry (Dandridge, James Edwards). Among the anecdotes, the book peeks into which white stars befriended their black colleagues or servants (Gene Kelly, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Rosalind Russell — who went into business with her African American assistant) and which ones didn’t (Miriam Hopkins was condescending, most studio executives weren’t terribly liberal).