In the 1980s, Billy Dee Williams boasted about being able to read women’s body language in a commercial for Colt 45 malt liquor. In real life, too, he prided himself on being an expert.
“The Empire Strikes Back” star’s colorful new memoir “What Have We Here?” is brimming with stories about his seven-decade career — but also more than a few salacious tales about orgies and open marriages.
But the one woman Williams couldn’t get close to was Diana Ross, his movie co-star in both “Lady Sings the Blues” and “Mahogany.”
“Diana was a gorgeous woman and I enjoyed kissing her. I loved kissing, period. Sometimes kissing could be even better than sex,” the actor writes. “The only person who had a problem with our kissing was Berry [Gordy].”
Gordy, the founder of Motown Records and producer of “Mahogany,” was Ross’ longtime secret lover and the father of her daughter Rhonda.
“During rehearsals, [Gordy] always found a reason to step in and stop us just before we got to the point where we kissed,” Williams, now 86, writes. “That’s good, that’s enough, you got it, and then you kiss.”
Once cameras were rolling, “it was Berry and not … the director, who would say, ‘Cut!’”
But Williams romanced plenty of other women. The Manhattan-raised actor, 87, shares that he lost his virginity at age 17 to a neighbor in his Harlem building.
“A woman in our building who was raising several children lured me into her apartment one day and seduced me,” he writes. “It didn’t take much effort … once she got me inside her place, she knew exactly what she wanted to do. I was at that age where all I knew was that I was having sex. I didn’t know how or why, only that it was happening.”
Williams won a scholarship to the National Academy of Fine Arts and Design and snagged a job as an extra for the Metropolitan Opera through a friend named Joey.
“He was gay, and so it seemed were most of the other extras, except for me,” he recalls. “Every night we partied in the Met’s basement, transforming this bastion of culture into one of the city’s hottest underground clubs … What an extraordinary time!”
The actor got his break on Broadway and was cast opposite Joan Plowright in the play “A Taste of Honey” in 1960.
Williams, then 23, writes that he loved working with “Joanie” and that he “flirted with constantly and unabashedly” with her — albeit in an odd way.
“She liked onions and I liked garlic. Onstage, we breathed all over each other and we got a kick out of quietly finding out what the other had eaten for lunch or dinner. I flirted with her constantly and unabashedly.”
But the actress’ much older fiancé, Sir Laurence Olivier, was starring in a play at the theater next door. One day, the Shakespearean legend came to visit and “caught me hitting on her. He feigned shock and anger and then let loose an infectious cackle,” Williams writes.
He had married actress Audrey Sellers in 1959 and, after that union ended in 1963, Williams began dating a woman named Yvonne, whom he had known since he was a teen.
The actor recalls coming home one day from the theater to find Yvonne hosting an orgy.
“There were women and men, and a lot of nakedness,” he writes. “The craziness was more than I was prepared to deal with after work.” So he decided to go take a shower and “invited a young woman who was already undressed to join me. Why not?”
As revenge, Yvonne insisted that Williams watch her have sex with another man — a scene he found hilarious.
Annoyed, Yvonne then grabbed a pair of scissors and cut up Williams’ “beautiful alpaca sweaters … that hurt almost more than if she’d cut me. It was the excuse I needed to get away from Yvonne.”
Williams and Richard Pryor starred in four movies together, including “Lady Sings the Blues,” “Hit” and “Carter’s Army.” They were even both in one of Williams’ favorite films of his career, “The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings,” about the Negro Baseball League.
The two actors were “good friends” for a while — but that “unraveled when I witnessed him abuse his girlfriend Patricia [Price], verbally and physically.
“It wasn’t a one-time incident either. Teruko [Nakagmi, Williams’ third wife] and I saw him strike her with a still smoldering log he took out of the fireplace and that ended our friendship.”
Later, Williams, writes, Patricia “told me about other examples, including one time when he hit her with a Courvoisier bottle.”
Witnessing the abuse ended the actors’ friendship.
“I couldn’t be around someone that behaved that way,” Williams writes of Pryor. “He knew that, and it made working together on ‘Bingo’ tense.”
Years later, Williams — who had an open marriage with Tenuko — embarked on his own decades-long affair with Pryor’s ex.
“The intense passion of our trysts was something we both craved. I was totally, thoroughly caught up in the romance of each one of our assignations,” he writes. “But Patricia was truly, madly obsessed. She once spray-painted a message on the guardrails along Mulholland Drive: I love Billy Dee.”
It ended when Patricia accused Williams of assault, but she later recanted her story and the charges were eventually expunged.
He eventually separated from Nakagmi but they never officially divorced — realizing it was financially easier to stay married.
As for those Colt 45 commercials, which cast Williams as a smooth-talking ladies’ man, he writes: “They made me a lot of money. That was a big part of my motivation for doing them. … But I was also expanding my brand in the way I always imagined. I was a romantic leading man.”
The idea, he says, is “They were scripted like mini romances. I impressed a beautiful woman by pouring an icy cold can into a glass, then walked away with her and intoned, ‘Works every time.’”
He took his best-known role — playing Lando Calrissian in 1980’s “The Empire Strikes Back” — because he loved the idea of the character wearing a cape.
“Amazing! It was old-school….I saw him in my head. He wasn’t written Black or White. He was beyond that. Bigger than that. He was straight out of [Alexandre] Dumas via ‘Flash Gordon.’ He was a star.”
In his ninth decade, Williams is still working and says he always tells people: “Don’t worry so much…Enjoy life. It’s a gift, an astonishing, mysterious, beautiful, absurd gift.”
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