In a way, it’s odd that Coppola decided that The Cotton Club required a concluding fantasy sequence. Yes, as a movie musical, The Cotton Club practically has an obligation to deliver a happy ending. But throughout the film we see that, to varying degrees, the real world depicted in the film — the New York Jazz Age — represents a fantasy all its own. While it is racial difference that organizes that real-world fantasy of stable hierarchies and people “knowing their place,” even a conclusion fabricated from whole cloth cannot envision a way to reconcile the racial divide in the segregated 1920s and ‘30s. It’s only on stage, where performance is diegetically isolated from actual social conditions, that skin color becomes a neutral or even a prized marker of human worth. Only on stage, with an enforced gulf between performer and audience, is Lila (Lonette McKee) able to achieve her dream of being “not black, not white, just a human being.”
In McKee’s case, the division between the imagined world of performance and the material world of everyday life was much less stable than The Cotton Club depicts. McKee was born in 1954. Her father was African-American, her mother of Swedish extraction. As one of only a handful of successful biracial actresses in her generation, McKee found herself addressing issues of skin tone and “passing” throughout her career. In addition to The Cotton Club, two of her best-known roles deal explicitly with racial legibility and the problem of colorism within the Black community. In Julie Dash’s Illusions (1982), McKee plays Mignon, a Hollywood executive who passes for white. Her specific task in the film is to hire a Black singer (Rosanne Katon) whose vocal track will be lip-synched by a white actress on screen. (It’s particularly noteworthy that while Mignon’s white associates consistently fail to recognize her racial difference, the young Black singer picks up on it immediately.)
McKee also played a major supporting role in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever (1991) as Drew, the wife of Flipper (Wesley Snipes), the Black architect who has an affair with his white secretary Angie (Annabella Sciorra). Lee’s consideration of the complications of interracial relationships, Jungle Fever again uses McKee and her biracial identity as a node within a series of raced and gendered positions and ideologies. In one of the film’s key monologues, Drew articulates her own racial anxieties, wondering whether her own light skin has made her attractive to Flipper as a transition into dating white women. In other words, the actress’s own body serves once again as a pole around which racial discourses circulate.
It’s perhaps not surprising that Coppola’s film does not conceptualize Lila’s racial identity as thoroughly or thoughtfully as Dash’s and Lee’s films. Like many other aspects of The Cotton Club, Lila’s decision to pass in order to negotiate racist social and professional barriers is presented as a fait accompli. Perhaps Coppola assumes that the viewer will have sufficient distance from the racial mores of 1920s America that to simply present them as-is constitutes distanciation or critique. This is, of course, naïve. Nevertheless, one can perhaps identify a potent if accidental statement on Lila’s situation in the fantasy finale. After all, it’s only by departing from lived reality that Lila can stop passing, embrace her Black identity, and begin an open relationship with Sandman (Gregory Hines). In other words, Coppola recognizes that he cannot resolve the social disparity between performance and the stage, on the one hand, and segregation/Jim Crow on the other. So instead, he subsumes harsh reality within the Hollywood magic of a forced, fictionalized happy ending.
But this highly artificial conclusion may be more complex than it initially seems. One character’s story throws the others into stark relief, mainly because for him, the wish-fulfillment of the closing scene is almost extraneous, like whipped cream and cherry on the sundae of his charmed life. Michael “Dixie” Dwyer (Richard Gere) is the golden child of The Cotton Club: a young, preternaturally handsome white man whose above-average cornet-playing permits him entrée into the Black world of Harlem jazz. At one point, an announcer remarks that Dixie is the only white player to have ever sat in with Cab Calloway’s (Larry Marshall) orchestra. In a demimonde defined by racial boundaries, Dixie is free to come and go as he pleases. But his privilege is very distinct from Lila’s burden of stealth Blackness. Despite a few minor setbacks, Dixie is almost impervious to failure, bumbling his way up the social and economic hierarchy.
The action that sets in motion the rest of Dixie’s good fortune is, appropriately enough, a reflex, an innate response to unforeseeable circumstances. While relaxing at a Harlem club, the NYPD attempts a hit on local gangster “Dutch” Schultz (James Remar). The cops toss a lit stick of dynamite under his table, and having noticed this, Dixie shoves Dutch out of harm’s way. Although Dixie’s connection to Dutch becomes a liability — the gangster means to make the musician into his errand boy — all further breaks seem to follow from this single stroke of luck. Dixie meets the singer Vera Cicero (Diane Lane), with whom he eventually falls in love. He is brought into the orbit of Broadway impresario Owney Maddin (Bob Hoskins) who, in an effort to help the young man get away from Dutch, sends him to Hollywood where, following a screen test he arranged, Dixie is cast as the lead in the movie Mob Boss.
Is this someone in need of a deus ex machina? When The Cotton Club reaches its conclusion, Dixie is already a rising movie star as well as a respected musician. The “Hollywood ending” Coppola engineers for him — the death of Dutch, which frees Vera to run away with him — is almost comically extraneous. The last remaining barrier to his happiness falls like the final domino. When we compare this with the good fortune afforded to Lila and Sandman (which looks a lot more like a mere absence of oppression), it perhaps suggests that Coppola really is engaging in some form of distanciation or irony. Because although as posited earlier that Dixie stumbled into the perfect life by saving Dutch’s life, The Cotton Club ultimately reminds us that Dixie had won the genetic lottery long before that. He gets to look like Richard Gere, but above all, he gets to be a white man in America (some mild anti-Irish slurs notwithstanding). And where the Black performers are literally restricted — able to form their own utopian space only within the parameters of the performance stage — Dixie (interesting name!) has the world in his back pocket.
Published as part of Francis Ford Coppola: As Big As Possible.
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