JAMES EARL JONES, BILLY DEE, BARRY GORDY, AND ME

By Juan Montoya

Today's news that leading black actor James Earl Jones had died took me back to July 16, 1976 when I was sent on an assignment to the inner city in Detroit to do a review of the film Bingo Long's Traveling All Stars and Motor Kings, a story about a barnstorming Negro Baseball League team in the 1930s.

The film's premier in Detroit was hosted by Barry Gordy's Motown Productions and featured black movie heavyweights Bingo Long (Billy Dee Williams) who gets fed up with how his Negro League team owner treats him so he forms his own lineup, recruiting big-hitting Leon Carter (James Earl Jones) and Charlie Snow (Richard Pryor), who dreams of playing in the majors. At one time, Pryor claimed he was Cuban to see if he could sneak into the majors.

The film went on to become a money maker, earning Motown $33 million. I was then a junior at the University of Michigan J school in Ann Arbor and was working with a weekly liberal rag called the Michigan Free Press, not to be confused with the Detroit Free Press, of Detroit. 

The premier of the movie was held in the inner city and me and my photographer found ourselves interviewing Jones and Williams in a black stretch limo around the corner from the theater where a large crowd was already pouring into the building (I think it was the Fox Theater, but I'm not sure.) It was a high-class crowd, with limos lined up to empty their occupants at the doors.

That afternoon we were invited to Barry Gordy's mansion in Detroit and walked through a mausoleum that contained a swimming pool with a multicolored tiled bottom that seemed to undulate as the water rippled. Pillars and Greek sculptures lined both sides of the pool.

I had heard about Jones and Williams (and Richard Pryor who did not attend) and we were given between 15 or 20 minutes to interview them as they sat in their tuxedos in the limo, one of those long black jobs that had seats facing each other and we were sitting across them.
 

When we got the invite, my editor asked that I get a provocative quote from Jones that we could use as our banner head.

Williams was at once brash, suave and cool as a leading man and he acted the part. Jones was more centered and gracious as he talked with us. ("I am the definition of cool," Williams had responded to a question)

I asked the man who had played in The Great White Hope, and later in the Field of Dreams – and much later was the voice of Darth Vader in Star Wars – what role he would like to play in the future. He thought about it and said he would like to play Idi Amin, the Ugandan dictator. The Israeli raid at Entebbe, Uganda to rescue Israeli hostages had just happened earlier that month (July 3-4) and it was still fresh in the public's mind.

"Why would you want to play a dictator?," I asked him.

"He is a black man who realized his power," Jones replied. "Remember when he had a team of  Briton businessmen carry him aloft in a litter? He is one of very few black men who realized his power," Jones said, in “the same way that African slaves carried Europeans.”

I knew that quote would satisfy my editor and we alighted from the limousine. By this time, the limo was surrounded by scores of black kids and teens throughout the neighborhood. I thought that heart-throb Williams would be the main attraction to the kids, but was somewhat surprised when their whispers among them as they stood around the limo and as it pulled around the corner to make their grand entrance were about Jones.

"That be James Earl Jones," they said. "Mr. Earl Jones."