Making room at the top for a few women of color

One pounded the keyboard next to Yo-Yo and bagged the top national security job with Bush. The other grabbed an Oscar last March, then bedded Bond this fall.

One is attempting to save the free world by going nose to nose with Saddam Hussein, the linchpin of the Axis of Evil. The other actually does save the cinematic free world by thwarting an evil renegade North Korean colonel who, thanks to the miracle of DNA splicing and astute overseas casting, somehow winds up resembling a demented, redheaded Hugh Grant.

Condoleezza Rice and Halle Berry: the Newsweek profile subject and the Cosmo cover girl. You probably won’t ever find them swapping fashion tips on Rodeo Drive or comparing missile throw-weights in the West Wing.

But last week at the Ralphs checkout counter there was Rice, the first black woman ever to serve as national security advisor, in modest, from-the-neck-up repose, complete with alpha stare and U.S.-flag lapel pin. Right next to her on the magazine rack was Berry, the first black woman to win a best actress Academy Award, complete with flattering bare shoulders and a typical Cosmo come-on headline promising “Her Most Honest Interview Ever.” Even so, Berry’s pose was as much about power as about pulchritude.

Black women haven’t had an easy time attaining such uncontested prominence, either in politics or pop culture. Sometimes their public triumphs are woefully short-lived, as in the sad cases of C. Lani Guinier and Joycelyn Elders, both the beneficiaries of equal-opportunity dumping by their putative advocate, Bill Clinton, when the going got tough.

Even after serving as Stanford University provosts or snapping up gold statuettes, black women may find themselves still pounding on the door, hoping the Washington or Hollywood establishment will finally invest in them the trust and responsibility they have earned. Now, for a change, someone has.

“That’s something very different for a white man, I believe, to put their trust in a black woman,” says Lundeana Thomas, who teaches African American theater at the University of Louisville. “For President Bush, he’s not only saying, ‘I trust you with my life,’ [he’s saying] ‘I trust you with my country.’ Putting the whole country’s defense into this black woman’s hands. That’s a lot. And the jury’s still out on whether she’s doing a great job or whatever. My thing is, she’s maintaining.”

“Black, Brainy and Bush’s Secret Weapon” is the way Newsweek touts its 10-page portrait of “The Real Condi Rice.” Substitute Bond (James Bond) for Bush, and you’ve got an instant copy block for posters of “Die Another Day,” the umpteenth 007 flick, in which Berry co-stars opposite Pierce Brosnan.

In Newsweek’s profile, we learn that Rice has won over the president by keeping peace among the Bush inner circle. Between confronting Al Qaeda and shopping Saks Fifth Avenue, Rice somehow found time earlier this year to perform a duet with cellist Yo-Yo Ma (she’s a recital-quality pianist). The magazine can’t help tattling about Rice’s “weakness” for Ferragamo pumps, but it also features a photo of her pumping iron.

We’ve also learned that Berry, her academy accolades notwithstanding, had to win over her “Die Another Day” partner-in-mayhem. According to at least one published report, Brosnan had briefly wondered if Berry had the requisite acting craft to hold her own against prior Bond heroines. (Having the requisite dimensions for an Ursula Andress-style retro bikini was apparently never a problem.) In the movie, Berry’s wise-cracking, butt-whipping character, Jinx, is presented as Bond’s secret-agent equal, and she even takes the aggressor’s role in their obligatory undercover interlude.

“I think one of the things that I admire about Halle Berry is that she knows how to use her image and to use it in ways that benefit her,” says L.A. fiction writer Paula L. Woods, author of “Inner City Blues” and “Stormy Weather: A Charlotte Justice Novel.” “I thought her performance in [“Die Another Day”] was masterful, saucy and with that little bit of innuendo.”

Of course, diving off cliffs and blowing up bad guys isn’t remotely as dangerous as trying to juggle the competing egos and agendas of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, et al. But Berry’s accomplishments go deeper. After winning the Oscar for “Monster’s Ball” last spring, she gracefully rode out a heated debate over whether her sex scenes with Billy Bob Thornton reinforced or shattered old cultural stereotypes of black women.

Now, Berry may have helped save the ailing Bond franchise, which has been stuck on cruise control since the late 1970s, trying to breeze by on Oxford-inflected insouciance and bad double-entendres. Bond’s bosses finally realize it’s a tricky planet out there, and middle-age white guys can’t expect to run the whole show by themselves.

“Die Another Day” had a strong opening weekend and has been holding up well at the box office. Brosnan’s temples may be graying suavely, but the series had been having trouble attracting teens, young adults and women to its martini-dry, Cold War worldview -- until now. Already there are plans to create a Jinx spinoff franchise.

Woods says it’s tough for any popular image of a woman to “embody the brain, the brawn and the beauty” simultaneously, “but I think it becomes exacerbated when you lay race on top of it.” Why, she asks, is Rice considered a “secret weapon” when “anyone who follows foreign affairs knows she’s intimately involved in [Bush’s] foreign policy and is one of the people he relies on.”

“I think the challenge for Condoleezza Rice,” Woods concludes, “is how is she going to manage her image.” Will she be like Halle Berry, or like Guinier, Elders and Anita Hill, who reluctantly found others creating an image for them?

Rice “can’t control what Newsweek says, she can’t control the way they take a photograph,” Woods says. “But I think she was almost masterful in that she didn’t give them anything she didn’t want them to know.”

Which is prudent, perhaps, now that saving the world, like making a hit movie, seems a lot more complicated than it used to.

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Reed Johnson can be reached at reed.johnson@latimes.com