We sat in the hotel room and coolly drank tea like the English.”īeing a devoted Anglophile, Dandridge was already primed to fall for the actor Peter Lawford when he came to see her show at the New Frontier in Las Vegas in the early 1950s, with fellow stars June Allyson and Van Johnson. “When the attacks became frequent, we didn’t always go below.
It was in the shelters that I developed an affinity with the English which has been with me always,” she writes. “During the Blitz I would take a blanket with me…and pass the time in conversation with the English. It was myself that I began giving up.”ĭuring World War II, the Dandridge Sisters were booked at the Palladium in London, a city Dandridge adored even as being there meant she had to find shelter from German bombs. “On the outside I said to myself, ‘I’ve had it, I’ll give her up.’ Inside I never gave her up. Except this: I knew that to everyone else she was hideous.”ĭue to the brutal medical norms of the times, Dandridge was eventually convinced by doctors to give Lynn to a caretaker. “I have known quite a few men, since then, but I tell you, you cannot get that feeling from anything else in the world. “She’d hug me tight, crushing into my breasts,” Dandridge writes. Lynn was severely intellectually disabled, a condition Dandridge blamed on her delayed birth (Nicholas had gone golfing and left her without a car). The primary ghost in Dandridge’s life was her only child, Harolyn Suzanne “Lynn” Nicholas, born in 1943 during her first marriage to dancing legend Harold Nicholas. “If it is possible for a human being to be like a haunted house,” she writes, “maybe that would be me.” In her perceptive, often humorous autobiography, Everything and Nothing: The Dorothy Dandridge Tragedy, published in 1970-five years after her death-Dandridge and cowriter Earl Conrad lay out her search for love in candid, often luscious prose.
Dorothy Dandridge accomplished many things in her short life she was the first Black woman nominated for the best-actress Oscar and the first Black woman on the cover of Life magazine.
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