Hollywood Codebreakers: Interracial Couples Fall in Love on an ‘Island in the Sun’
Harry Belafonte was performing seven nights a week in Las Vegas when he decided to get married — for the second time, in secret, to a white woman. He’d only been divorced from his first wife Marguerite for a week, but he was in love with Julie Robinson, and she also happened to be three months pregnant. The couple was determined to marry as soon as possible.
Belafonte didn’t care what the press wrote about it, but he had an 8-year-old daughter at home, and he didn’t want the inevitable media blitz to upset her. So he and Robinson hatched a plan. They’d get married in Mexico, in between two of his gigs. Belafonte flew out to San Diego on the morning of March 8, 1957, soon after his latest show wrapped. He jumped into a car with his fiancee and her parents, driving across the border to Tecate, where the mayor himself married the couple in a civil ceremony. Then it was back to San Diego and, for Belafonte, back to Vegas, just in time for the next show. He wouldn’t see his new wife for another five days, or tell the press about her for another month.
But when he was ready to talk about her, Belafonte made one thing quite clear: his marriage was not a political act. “I believe in integration and work for it with all my heart and soul,” he wrote in Ebony. “But I did not marry Julie Robinson to further the cause of integration. I married her because I was in love with her, and she married me because she was in love with me.
“The bigots didn’t like it and backward people fumed and muttered. That doesn’t worry Julie and me, for we have each other and that’s the most important thing.”
Belafonte might not have worried about those bigots and backward people, but Hollywood did, and the industry was incredibly anxious about his film Island in the Sun, which depicted two interracial couples falling in love in the Caribbean. Despite the recently relaxed PCA rules on miscegenation, there would be no kissing for either of these pairs — it was just too risky, producers reasoned, to play something like that in front of Southern audiences. But when the movie raked in heaps of money, industry insiders decided it might be time to “write Dixie off as a dead loss” and forge ahead with a new wave of cinematic romances featuring more diverse stars.
In 1957, interracial marriage was still illegal in nearly half the United States. The issue was increasingly appearing in court, as couples challenged local anti-miscegenation laws with some degree of success. But the nation was still a decade away from Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court case that would make interracial marriage legal in all 50 states, and it was a hostile climate for couples of different races. Strangers might spit on them in the street, or leave threatening messages in their mailboxes. Movie dates were much easier when they entered separately.
But, perhaps unsurprisingly, Darryl Zanuck was attracted to this hot-button issue. The Fox producer known for his social problem dramas acquired the rights to Alec Waugh’s novel Island in the Sun before it was even published, let alone a bestseller. The book takes place on Santa Marta, a fictitious Central American island with two distinct worlds — the world of the black native workers and the world of the rich white colonizers. These worlds collide through romance and politics, as the island spins closer and closer to revolt.
The book includes several violent clashes between the white and black residents, including a dramatic climax wherein the murderous (and frankly, worthless) son of a plantation owner yells racial slurs at a black crowd until they attack and kill him. Geoffrey Shurlock worried violence like this “constitutes an unfair portrayal of the Negro race,” so much so “that it could reasonably inflame Negro people.” Zanuck accepted this PCA note, and the screenplay lost some of the book’s more violent clashes. But Zanuck insisted on a bold script in letters to screenwriter Alfred Hayes. “Throughout the years I have learned in making picture like… PINKIE [sic] and GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT, that it is foolish to get into a… controversial story and then try to white-wash it,” Zanuck wrote. “In Island in the Sun, we would be foolish to go into a black-versus-white story and then avoid the situations which are controversial.”
Still, controversial for Zanuck still wasn’t that controversial. Later letters reveal he was actually pretty nervous about the interracial love scenes, urging Hayes to downplay the sexual heat. He was especially concerned about Belafonte’s character David Boyeur and his white love interest Mavis Norman (Joan Fontaine), telling Hayes to adopt an “intellectual approach” to their banter. “We should keep the feeling of romance or sex out of [their] relationship,” he wrote. But Zanuck was also antsy about a kiss in the original script between drugstore clerk Margot Seaton (Dorothy Dandridge) and the governor’s aide Denis Archer (John Justin). Zanuck lamented, “I think we are in trouble censorshipwise with the kissing,” and instructed Hayes to nix it, leaving the characters “to dance on and on, and we can end on the dancing.”
That altered kiss would prove to be quite the point of contention, and misinformation. Many modern sources insist to this day that Island in the Sun contains the first interracial kiss onscreen, even though it clearly does not. The closest thing we get is Dandridge’s dramatic shudder as Justin hugs her, which is, in case this is unclear, not a kiss. The cast complained about it a lot, particularly in the pages of black magazines. “I definitely think that the movie industry has a policy which prohibits love-making and kissing between interracial couples,” Belafonte told Ebony. His costar Fontaine added, “At least I have made them agree that Harry and I can drink out of the same coconut together in a scene. But they insist no kissing.” Dandridge also told Jet that she and Justin had to fight for the line, “You know I’m in love with you, don’t you?” after Zanuck suggested the more neutered, “You know how we feel.” But interestingly, Zanuck is also quoted in the Ebony article, denying any censor pressure on the subject and that there was ever a kissing scene at all.
Despite all of Zanuck’s paranoia over censor problems, the movie passed the PCA pretty easily. It opened to long lines and dreadful reviews, including from Belafonte himself. (He called it a “terrible picture based on a terrible best-selling book.”) The movie naturally attracted hate from segregationists and white supremacists, who organized against Island in the Sun. The Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberty tried to get it banned in Arlington, even calling on the Department of Defense to keep the film out of army base movie theaters. A small group of robed Klansmen showed up to picket the film in Charlotte, but scattered once the police showed up. Variety reported a cross burning outside of a Greensboro drive-in theater showing the movie. Fontaine claimed the KKK sent her hate mail.
In South Carolina, a state representative introduced a bill to ban the movie from local theaters, prompting Zanuck to offer to pay the fines of any exhibitor who showed it. Atlanta city officials issued a temporary restraining order when Island in the Sun arrived in their drive-ins, but Memphis actually banned it as “too frank a depiction of miscegenation, offensive to moral standards, and no good for either white or Negro.”
This is all pretty bad, but in the grand scheme of things, Zanuck and Fox were expecting much worse. The trades claimed there was “more smoke than fire in the loud Southern threats” and pointed to the surprisingly strong numbers Island in the Sun was pulling in Lexington, Louisville, and Oklahoma City. Piggybacking off the success, Janus Films quickly imported The Heroes Are Tired, a French film about fighter pilots in Africa. Band of Angels (a Civil War drama) and The Night of the Hawk (an indie on West African nationalism) were also entering theaters around the same time, leading Variety to print a story on the rising “racial film drama tide” that included the subhead “‘Write Off’ Dixie as Dead Loss.”
In the Code era, “racial film dramas” tended to come like this — in tides that dried up once the industry determined the trend had passed. And while it would be easy to blame the PCA for these starts and stops, Zanuck’s letters prove that the studios were doing a lot of voluntary self-censorship. Gutsy, serious-minded producers were willing to go to the mat on certain topics, like drugs or, more often, a risqué joke between straight white characters. But they were less willing to push the envelope on race, unless it involved their right to say “n*****.” Portraying a realistic interracial relationship just wasn’t worth the hassle.
At the tail end of the decade, three very different movies dropped that mounted significant challenges to the Code. They all came from frequent troublemakers, with the first being Billy Wilder. Some Like It Hot caught flack for its “transvestism,” or more accurately, cross-dressing, in the name of comedy. But it was a huge hit, and it only emboldened Wilder to pursue racier romps into the 1960s. We’ll discuss Sugar Kane, fuzzy lollipops, and Jack Lemmon’s tango skills next week on Hollywood Codebreakers.
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