Life Upon the Wicked Stage : Lonette McKee almost won a Tony in the 1983 ‘Show Boat’ as the mixed-race Julie. Now she’s back on Broadway--same show, same role. : How come? Don’t get her started.

In Francis Ford Coppola’s 1984 flop “The Cotton Club,” Lonette McKee, playing a beautiful torch singer, sang a haunting ballad called “Ill Wind.” She knew of what she sang, for on screen and stage she has created a number of star-crossed characters, none more touching than the half-black/half-white Julie in “Show Boat” for which she won a Tony nomination in 1983 when the Houston Grand Opera revived the 1927 musical epic on Broadway.

Now, a decade later, as she prepares to open again next Sunday in the same role in the lavish new Harold Prince-Garth Drabinsky production at the Gershwin Theatre, McKee has the age-worn and slightly cynical air of someone who herself has been buffeted by life.

Asked what’s happened in the intervening years to make this Julie different from the last, McKee responds with a throaty laugh, “Well she’s lived, honey. She’s 10 years older and she’s been through a lot.”

Indeed, since the actress last sashayed across the stage as Julie, her once-promising career has moved in fits and starts, with momentary bright turns, like her Billie Holiday in the 1986 Off Broadway success “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill” and a series of small but flashy film roles in “ ‘Round Midnight,” “Gardens of Stone,” “Jungle Fever” and “Malcolm X.” But, following the breakup of her marriage to Leo Compton, a high-school counselor, her career stalled so completely that she was forced to move to an embattled low-rent Brooklyn neighborhood with her new boyfriend, rock-musician Bryant McNeil, whom she met while working on her 1992 album, “Natural Love.”

The tough breaks of the past may have bruised her psyche, but they haven’t marked her physically. Sitting in her dressing room during rehearsal just prior to the start of previews, McKee, at 39, is still the arresting beauty whose 1976 film debut in “Sparkle” inspired critic Pauline Kael to write, “McKee has the sexual brazenness that screen stars Susan Hayward and Ava Gardner had in their youth.”

That beauty, however, flashes with frustration and some anger when she talks about a career that has admittedly become less and less fulfilling for her. The exception, of course, is the opportunity to play the classic role of Julie, who “passes” until the discovery of her mixed-race origins banishes her and her white husband from Cap’n Andy’s Mississippi showboat. Adapted in 1927 by Oscar Hammerstein from the Edna Ferber novel, the musical, at least in the first act, is dominated by Julie, and it is her tale of miscegenation and racism that gives it such dark and unsettling power. Though she abruptly disappears, she briefly returns in the second act to sing the torch anthem, “Bill,” and, in this new stage version, to give a hint of the degradation and alcoholism that followed her disgrace.

“It’s a great role and a great team, Hal and Garth, so when they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, I took it,” says McKee, who had first turned down the offer to repeat the role of Julie before she knew that it was Prince who was directing.

The production itself ran into public protests against what many blacks deemed to be stereotypes before it opened in Toronto last September. But McKee says that the controversy was rendered moot once the production was on view. She does register some impatience with the fact that blacks have had to continually fall back on playing roles connected to their tragic past rather than their present contributions.

“Black actors are tired of the only roles being available to us are the ‘historically correct’ ones of the olden days,” she says bristling. “Why do we always have to be offered roles where we’re housekeepers and slaves? We were, and we have a lot to be proud of that past, but what about what we’re bringing to the table today?”

With such a paucity of female roles, McKee has been unable to exploit the promise of stardom first predicted for her. She’s long since stopped listening to the periodic puzzling in the press as to why she is not yet a household word.

“Tell ‘them’ I’ll become a star when they start writing great roles for black women in films,” she says, bemoaning the mostly white, mostly male power structure of the industry. “Russell Simmons and Spike (Lee) have made some progress but things really haven’t advanced all that much.”

In fact, it’s rather surprising to note that McKee was actually the first black woman to play Julie in a major American production (Cleo Laine played it in London in the early ‘70s). Lena Horne was slated for the role in the 1951 film, but the studio got cold feet and cast Ava Gardner who slapped on dark makeup to play the chanteuse.

McKee, who is herself the product of an interracial marriage between a Mississippi-born black factory worker and the daughter of Scandinavian immigrants, can closely identify with her character’s sad and confused search for a place in society. Though early on McKee began by calling herself a “mulatto,” she says that she quickly learned that when it comes to the politics and social mores of identity, she is a black woman.

“I realized that the only way this society was going to view my calling myself a ‘mulatto’ was as a rejection of my blackness, which was certainly not the case,” she said. “I’m proud of my black heritage and I’m proud of my white mother too.

“When I was growing up,” she added of her childhood in a rough working-class section of Detroit, “my mother taught me and my two sisters that we had the best of both worlds, the opportunities and advantages of both races. But, in retrospect, that was idealistic of her. Now I’d tell kids from a mixed background, ‘Remember your roots, and be proud, but don’t be fooled. If you have black blood, in society’s terms you are black and you will be treated as such.’ ”

Enraptured by the local Detroit Motown sound, as a 6-year-old McKee began composing songs on the family piano and by the time she was 14 she had scored a local hit on the pop charts. Emboldened by the success, her ambitious mother hocked her wedding ring and sent McKee off to join her older sister, who was also pursuing a career on the West Coast.

“We damn near starved to death in Los Angeles,” says McKee of those years, recalling that she was once thrown out of a car on Mulholland Drive because she had refused to have sex with a guy to advance her career. “I was told that I was too white for black roles and too black for white roles. I still hear that. They see me for the Michelle Pfeiffer and Annabella Sciorra roles. I just don’t get them.”

A break came when, at 18, she was a featured singer-dancer on the television variety show “The Wacky World of Jonathan Winters”. But it was on that show that she herself became acquainted with dark makeup when the producers and director asked her to use it, sensing that the public would prefer a more “stereotypical” notion of a black entertainer. “It wasn’t demeaning at the time,” recalls McKee. “I think I was too young to realize what was going on.”

The entertainer, however, did put her foot down years later, in 1981 to be exact, when director Martin Charnin asked her to darken her makeup to play Jackie Robinson’s wife in the Broadway musical, “The First,” based on the famous ballplayer’s life. It was her Broadway debut and she admits to being intimidated at first.

When asked if her initial reluctance to complain might not also be explained by an ambitious desire to please, McKee laughs. “Well, I was certainly ambitious to a degree,” she says. “But I was never the kind of girl that would do anything to get ahead, which is probably why I’m not further along in my career now.”

After the closing of “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill,” Lanie Robertson’s one-person show in which McKee played Billie Holiday on the skids, and the failure of “Cotton Club,” the actress was disillusioned with the business and even now it is obvious that she finds it hard to muster up much enthusiasm for being “cooped up” in a dressing room for eight performances a week.

Her ambitions these days are directed to composing and writing, and she has formed a record label, “Flat Daddy,” with boyfriend McNeil. “I think it takes a certain masochism to stay in this industry,” she says, “having to put on a ton of makeup and eyelashes and these big clothes and go out there and say ‘yessir, yessir, yessir.’ Despite the glamour and fun, actors are really low man on the totem pole and aren’t really treated all that wonderfully well. So my advice to any young people who ask me is to be producers, directors, writers, not performers.”*