Rival Josephine Baker Stories Under Way at HBO and TNT

The morning after appearing on the Oscar show, Diana Ross announced Tuesday that she will play the late entertainer Josephine Baker in a three-hour production for Ted Turner’s TNT cable service. It will be her first film role since “The Wiz” in 1978.

Introduced by Turner at a news conference at the Four Seasons Hotel, Ross, who won an Oscar nomination playing singer Billie Holiday in “Lady Sings the Blues,” said her desire to portray Baker has been “almost a lifetime project” that has not succeeded until now.

She said her representatives approached TNT and that, although she thinks “The Josephine Baker Story” is meant for the big screen because the entertainer was larger than life, she’ll have more time to tell her tale in the three-hour length.

“I just thought that America and young black women should know her,” Ross said.

HBO will get to make the introduction first, however. The pay-cable service is planning its own life story of the entertainer, “Josephine Baker,” which is scheduled to begin shooting next month for airing later this year. It will star Lynn Whitfield, and the executive producers are David Puttnam (“Chariots of Fire,” “The Killing Fields”) and Robert Halmi (“Lonesome Dove,” “The Incident”).

Ross will be executive producer of the TNT film. Scott Sassa, executive vice president of TNT, said that filming is expected to begin this year and that the cable service is hoping to present the show in 1991. Ross said that the film will also be released as a theatrical feature overseas because “Josephine was more popular in Europe than in America.”

Baker, described by Ernest Hemingway as “the most sensational woman anybody ever saw, or ever will,” was a legendary star of the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s who became the sensation of Paris as a singer and dancer whose exotic performances included semi-nude appearances.

Born in St. Louis, the daughter of a washerwoman, she also became a controversial figure espousing racial desegregation. One of her feuds was with the late columnist Walter Winchell. Her tumultuous life included entertaining French and American troops in North Africa and Europe during World War II. She was honored by the French government for participating in the Resistance movement and entertaining troops.

Asked if the TNT project would show her erotic dance, Ross said: “We’d like to have dance in there, and we’ll concentrate on that part somewhat.” A photo distributed with the TNT announcement shows Ross as Baker in a revealing costume.

HBO spokesman Richard Licata said that the pay service’s production will present the nude dance “without a question. It’s an integral part of the story. People ask if the (Ross) project will take away our thunder. Absolutely not. We think we have the thunder and lightning in Lynn Whitfield. HBO’s project has got to be the TV event of 1990. It’s the most ambitious film HBO has ever attempted.”

Ross seemed to show particular interest in Baker’s wartime activities. Most Americans, she said, remember Baker from her so-called Rainbow Tribe--the dozen orphaned or abandoned children she adopted from all over the world in the 1950s, an act that eventually led her into debt.

“But,” said Ross, “Europe knows her mostly from the war and the early days when she was the toast of Paris. She was like a Mata Hari during the war. She was just one of a kind. She believed in America and racial equality.”

Ross laughed that Baker once “stood up and took my applause” at an award ceremony in Paris. She also said that when she was doing a concert, Baker “came through the audience with all her feathers--she walked straight up to me and grabbed me by my hair, stared me in the eyes and walked away.”