Before Billy Dee Williams romanced Diana Ross on the streets of Chicago in “Mahogany,” or put on a Bears uniform in “Brian’s Song,” he performed at the Playboy Club on the Magnificent Mile.
Following the release of his album of jazz standards, “Let’s Misbehave,” in 1961, he booked a two-week gig at the venue.
During his time in the city, he said he stayed at the Maryland Hotel, encountered a “lonely” Lenny Bruce and witnessed a mob beating.
But after hearing Malcolm X speak on TV, Williams wanted to cancel his second show and just ruminate on the activist’s words, according to his recently released memoir, “What Have We Here?: Portraits of a Life.”
“I didn’t have that kind of authority, and in retrospect that was a good thing, because I ended up taking the emotion of that interview onto the stage and channeling it into my performance,” writes Williams, now 86.
More Chicago stories are sure to surface when Williams visits the Francis W. Parker School on Thursday for a conversation presented by WBEZ. Those who read his book will discover a multifaceted man who rose through the ranks of Hollywood, created iconic roles, and fought to evade labels as the industry attempted to pigeonhole him.
“I lived my life based on what I wanted to do, not what other people wanted me to do or be,” Williams told the Chicago Sun-Times. “I wanted to bring my own uniqueness. I wanted to bring my own innovation.”
Like so many other artists from Harlem, Williams is a renaissance man. He studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts and Design and created paintings that are housed in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, New York’s Schomburg Center for Research and Black Culture, and other notable museums.
He said he has approached painting and acting in a similar way.
“Acting is a matter of not only painting your broad strokes, but it’s also based on nuance and subtleties,” he said. “And certainly painting is the same thing. You suddenly experience this world, this gray area where there are all of these hues and colors.”
Williams found variety not only within each performance, but among his acting roles, playing everyone from Martin Luther King Jr. on Broadway to Harvey Dent in Tim Burton’s “Batman.” His desired role of playing Duke Ellington has proven elusive, though, and he said the treatment for the movie remains on his shelf.
When it came to portraying Chicago Bears player Gale Sayers in the 1971 TV movie “Brian’s Song,” Williams said he observed the athlete to pick up his idiosyncrasies.
“Gale and I rarely ever talked to each other,” Williams said. “But our personalities were fairly similar in that he was a very reticent and private person. I was meant to play him. We even look a little bit alike, except I’m better-looking.”
In the 1970s, writer James Baldwin insisted Williams play Malcolm X in a screenplay he was developing. However, Williams said some studio execs were more interested in casting Marlon Brando — with darkened skin — though that never came to fruition.
“It was very interesting,” Williams said, laughing.
Still, Williams cherished his time hanging out with Baldwin.
“He had this incredible spirit,” Williams said. “I took him to my tailor and had two suits made for him. He was overjoyed. And then we ran off to Paris with his brother.”
Williams’ performances in “Lady Sings the Blues” and “Mahogany” earned him the nickname “the Black Clark Gable,” but he struggled to get more parts as a romantic lead, especially opposite white actresses.
“I don’t dwell on it,” he said. ”I just take a negative and make a positive. I don’t want to tax my brain with all of those kinds of concerns.”
But Williams does expound on race and discrimination in his book, whether it was being told how to act “Black” by a white director, or feeling that he had to make people “comfortable” by showing he was not “threatening.”
Williams’ memoir also revisits the racial commentary around his casting as Lando Calrissian in “Star Wars”; he said the franchise was criticized at the time for its lack of diversity.
“But the whole idea of Lando being just a Black person was not enough for me,” Williams said. “I wanted to make Lando bigger than life. I wanted to make him a swashbuckling character.”
Following the release of “The Empire Strikes Back,” Williams said he was confronted by a flight attendant, a grocery store customer and even his daughter’s schoolmates about “betraying” Han Solo.
But by the time “Return of the Jedi” came out, he said he was redeemed.
“There was something dubious about Lando, but he was very charming and good-looking, and he had enough vulnerability for people to embrace him,” Williams said. “That’s what people remember.”
