The Black Gable

His mustache is slightly thicker than Clark Gable's, his smile is even more dazzling, and he sees the possibilities. "Clark Gable is the apex," says Actor Billy Dee Williams. "A star is what everyone wants to be, even Presidents."

At 39, Williams looks more and more like Hollywood's first black matinee idol. Each week he receives nearly 8,000 letters, mostly from women--white and black--who love his almost boyish good looks and sloping fullback's shoulders. In Savannah, Ga., last summer the tactical police were called upon to cool the ardor of female fans who threw themselves and their phone numbers at Williams during the filming of The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings, a surprise summer hit about the black baseball leagues of the 1930s. Says Sidney Furie, who directed Williams in the 1972 hit Lady Sings the Blues: "He has the greatest magnetism of any actor on the screen."

Billy Dee's fortunes have risen rapidly in the past five years, since Motown Records Mogul Berry Gordy became his manager and teamed him with another Gordy protegee, Diana Ross.

Gordy, a shrewd judge of white audiences, was launching himself as a movie director. His two films, Mahogany and Lady Sings the Blues, were about blacks, but not about high-pitched racial antagonisms. They were glamorous, glossily turned out and entertaining rather than threatening. Their success has helped to broaden Williams' popularity with white audiences.

Although Billy Dee is robustly masculine, his touch is as light as Comedian Bill Cosby's; he has avoided the angry black-stud typecasting that has shackled Jim Brown and Fred Williamson. "I always keep Jimmy Cagney in mind," says Williams.

"Whatever meanness he'd show on the screen, audiences still liked him because they knew instinctively that he was a nice guy. I think they have that feeling about me."

Manager Gordy is planning to cross racial lines with his nice guy by casting him opposite such actresses as Faye Dunaway and Barbra Streisand. Says Williams: "I would like to do a romantic film with a woman of another color, but it would have to be tastefully done."

He is not spending all his efforts on launching his career as a matinee idol. Earlier this year, in Washington. D.C., he portrayed Martin Luther King Jr. in Josh Greenfeld's play I Have a Dream. He is currently working on a Universal back lot, playing the part of Black Composer Scott Joplin for an NBC special this fall. His mustache shorn, his hair slickly marcelled, Billy Dee sits before a dummy piano, miming perfect syncopation to Joplin's ragtime. Suddenly, on cue, he is distracted by the arrival of a lovely onlooker (Black Actress Margaret A very). Their eyes meet. The girl tries to feign disinterest, but she's hooked.

Even as a youngster growing up on 110th Street in New York's Harlem, Williams was the darling of the culture-craving women of the family. His grandmother entertained him by reciting Longfellow. His twin sister, Loretta, an aspiring ballerina, pirouetted through the apartment. Their mother had studied to become an opera singer, instead operated an elevator to work for her children's education. Young Billy earned extra money by drawing his own comic books and selling them to school chums for a nickel. At 19, he hoped to become a fashion illustrator. But a chance meeting with a CBS casting director led to bit parts on various shows, and at age 23 he achieved success in the hit play A Taste of Honey. But his career unexpectedly stalled during the racially turbulent 1960s. "I was too black for white producers and too light-skinned for blacks." Williams even tried using a sun lamp to make his black more beautiful, but only succeeded in burning his face.

Nowadays Billy Dee is firmly tied with a Gordyan knot--a guaranteed annual income of $200,000 whether he works or not, plus percentages of his films. A loner who lives quietly in a modest three-bedroom house in Laurel Canyon with his Japanese-American wife Teruko and three children, Williams spends free time meditating, sketching, writing poetry and working out daily in a gym. His life-style more closely resembles that of such famed loners as Robert Redford and Paul Newman than that of Billy Dee's gregarious idol Clark Gable. "I am still searching," says Williams seriously. "I think I have been chosen to be recognized in a certain kind of way. Producers are beginning to see me in situations other than black. I am part of an innovative force."

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