Porgy, Bess and Uncle Tom : THE LIFE AND TIMES OF PORGY AND BESS; The Story of an American Classic <i> By Hollis Alpert (Alfred A. Knopf: $35; 346 pp.)</i>

Picture this. Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures allegedly proposed to George Gershwin: If “Porgy and Bess” makes it to the screen, “we could cast Al Jolson as Porgy, Fred Astaire as Sportin’ Life . . . and Rita Hayworth as Bess.” As Hollis Alpert reports in this journalistically styled survey, however, Gershwin by no means fancied the notion of a white cast in black face; earlier he had refused the same proposal from Jolson himself, agreeing with DuBose Heyward, the writer who created the seminal 1925 novel, “Porgy,” that the story was meant for a black cast.

Set in 1912, “Porgy and Bess” purports to depict the harsh realities of life in Catfish Row, a Charleston, S.C., slum inhabited by blacks who speak Gullah, a Creole tongue that mixes English and West African languages. Porgy, an honorable, philosophical cripple on a goat-drawn cart, falls in love with Bess, a former prostitute kept by a murderous brute named Crown. Sportin’ Life, a drug-peddling devil incarnate, tempts Bess from the path to salvation--the love of a good man.

Alpert’s book focuses on those responsible for creating “Porgy and Bess” and on the behind-the-scenes struggle to stage the play and then the opera. Alpert sketches portraits of Heyward, his wife Dorothy, the Gershwins, acclaimed film maker Rouben Mamoulian--director of the play and the first opera production--and Robert Breen, the general director of the American National Theatre and Academy (ANTA) in the 1950s. Breen, whose life became enmeshed in the “Porgy and Bess” saga from the 1950s until his death in the 1970s, organized a tour of “Porgy and Bess” during the Cold War and fought to bring his stage version of the opera to the movie screen. He failed on the last score: Otto Preminger directed the critically unheralded motion picture.

While succeeding generations of critics have not taken Heyward seriously as either a writer or dramatist, Alpert sees him as “one of the most important influences in opening up the American stage to black participation. The large casts for ‘Porgy’ as both play and opera gave great opportunity to a host of black performers, made new black stars, and gave white and mixed audiences a new appreciation of the talents of black performing artists. . . . It is a contribution that lives on.”

Alpert also acknowledges, however, that since the opera opened in New York, many African Americans have found it to be a kind of Uncle Tomism, a rip-off of black culture. Some of Gershwin’s black detractors even have suggested that the music was stolen outright from melodies heard in black churches and then exploited for profit.

There is some truth in these theories. That Gershwin culled African-American musical sources for “Porgy and Bess” has never been in doubt. Gershwin said so himself, as Alpert’s book reports. But he used them as inspiration. It was not outright appropriation, as some still like to claim. In fact, as Alpert’s book points out, Duke Ellington criticized the opera not only for its stereotypical portrayal of blacks but for its ersatz black music: “The times are here . . . to debunk Gershwin’s lampblack Negroisms.” And he complained that “the music does not hitch with the mood and spirit of the story. It does not use the Negro musical idiom.” Still, Ellington thought it “grand music and a swell play, but the two didn’t go together.”

With every generation, Alpert points out, black criticism of “Porgy and Bess” became harsher. Thirty-two years after the opera’s New York opening, Harold Cruse, in his “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,” called the work “the most contradictory cultural symbol ever created in the Western World.” He went so far as to demand that blacks never perform in it.

Some modern-day resentment toward the play stems from the way the State Department exploited it during the Cold War to counter Communist propaganda about the virtual “enslavement” of black Americans. Breen, the American National Theater director, saw the tour as an “opportunity to show how blacks were rising in the cultural firmament,” Alpert reports, “and at the same time to nullify propaganda about their lack of opportunity.”

But while foreign audiences embraced “Porgy and Bess” casts featuring, among others, Leontyne Price, William Warfield, Maya Angelou and Cab Calloway, these artists had a tougher time at home. They were forced to use the “colored only” bathrooms in a suburban Washington restaurant, Alpert writes; to eat their food in a special basement room of the restaurant, and to use the back door of the Willard Hotel in the nation’s capital to get to their hotel rooms--which they had to find themselves once handed a key.

Truman Capote, whom Alpert paints as a waspish and unethical journalist, wrote about the Russian tour of “Porgy and Bess” and shrewdly guessed that Soviet permission for the tour came from the “opera’s message about people being happy when they have ‘plenty of nothin’.’ ”

As far as Cruse and many other critics are concerned, Jolson, Astaire and Hayworth should have had the starring roles. Clearly, though, Alpert doesn’t see it that way. Playing objective reporter, he discusses the racism that surrounded Porgy and Bess, but he often sounds like an apologist.

“The talented cast of ‘Porgy and Bess’ came from a host of schools and institutions,” he writes. “Broadway and the New York opera and concert halls were still the primary lure, but it was a large country out there and its hunger for entertainment and culture provided opportunity for gifted black artists.”

Alpert seems to forget that it was not until 1955, when she was 53 and her vocal powers were fading, that the great African American contralto, Marian Anderson, made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera House. Racism had prevented an earlier debut.

Leontyne Price, who first came to fame in the role of Bess in the 1952-54 road production of “Porgy and Bess,” did not make her Metropolitan debut until 1961. And even though African Americans are now among the world’s leading divas, black men still claim that they face enormous career obstacles in the operatic world.

It seems that anyone purporting to play the role of historian is obligated to understand how people saw their own times but not obligated to adopt their language or point of view.

Implicitly, Alpert suggests throughout this book that it was the largess of the liberal-minded whites associated with “Porgy and Bess “ that gave blacks the opportunity to prove how talented they were. That paternalistic attitude is not a particularly endearing argument to African Americans or any other perceptive U.S. citizen in 1990.

Nevertheless, that’s the way it was, so let’s move on. Right? The problem, however, is that that’s still the way it is--the few exceptions only proving the rule. The same attitude that ticked off black people when “Porgy” was first staged enrages them now: that of Euro-Americans who believe they know and understand African American culture better than the people who created it, and, most important, have the social and economic power to impose their interpretation.

Alpert misses this and other points throughout “The Life and Times of Porgy and Bess.” “Life and Times” suggests, of course, that Alpert plans to provide context, but he in fact fails to examine seriously the cultural and racial issues that shaped the creation of “Porgy” or defined the social circumstances under which it has been performed.

He tells us a little about the flowering of black literature, but his social history is maddeningly glib: “Ezra Pound was publishing his cantos, Fitzgerald telling his tales of the Jazz Age. T. S. Eliot saw it all as a ‘Waste Land’. . . .”

Alpert views much of the criticism of “Porgy and Bess” during the ‘60s and ‘70s as revisionist. Most African American artists weren’t complaining when the show debuted, he points out. Well, given that it was virtually the only game in town, of course they weren’t. How many opportunities did a classically trained African American singer have to perform in the United States until very recently, except for “Porgy and Bess”?

For better or worse, “Porgy and Bess” has helped define American culture. Its name conjures images of the nature of black life in America that are reinforced by similar contemporary stereotypes of so-called black-ghetto life in newspapers, films and on television. The problem, as always, is that there are not enough countervailing African American images in the popular media to balance the predominant portrayal of blacks as welfare queens, gang-bangers and dope peddlers.

Perhaps to “The Jeffersons,” “Sanford and Son” and “Good Times,” all of which Alpert cites, in a book published in 1990, as examples of shows that “carried their own stereotypes,” just as “Porgy and Bess” does, but now with a “note of racial pride.” Somehow it escaped him that the ‘80s sitcoms were not created by black writers but by white ones who thought they knew how African Americans lived.

As a work filled with some interesting anecdotes (though most of them are from other writers’ books), Alpert’s effort offers some pleasant and occasionally amusing reading.

Wisely, toward the end of his book, he suggests that people just accept “Porgy and Bess”--with all its outmoded sensibilities--as a set piece. That seems sound. But to some people just discovering “Porgy,” those sensibilities may not seem completely out of date. Take a real-life, 40-something-year-old man of color I know about, who had been passing as “white” all his life. Trying to impress an African-American woman, he told her he wanted to get her a new recording that was on sale: “You know, the Gershwin thing, Por . . . Por . . . Porky and Bess.”

Interpret the dynamics of that scenario, Mr. Alpert, and maybe you’ll get a handle on the real life and times of P and B.