WHAT HAVE WE HERE?
THIS BOOK DEAL IS GETTING BETTER ALL THE TIME!
★★★ AUTHOR BILLY DEE WILLIAMS
TO MOST, BILLY Dee Williams is Lando Calrissian: the line between him and the smooth-talking, cape-wearing, ladies-loving Star Wars space-smuggler forever blurred. The actor’s autobiography, What Have We Here? Portraits Of
A Life, is keen to stress that there’s more to him than that. But the similarities are in plain sight.
It seemed that way from the beginning. Born in New York in 1937, Williams describes his parents as “good-looking people with a sharp sense of style”; sartorial sophistication was highly valued in the Williams household. “Sonny, you always tip your hat to a lady,” his father advised him. His mother is described as his “first girlfriend”, one of many old-fashioned phrasings you’ll find here. Williams, now close to 90, is very much of the old school, and takes a traditionalist approach to writing —and a rather old-school approach to salaciousness, too.
In true Lando style, he writes in the language of the lothario. We read about one woman whose “sexuality was out in the open, like a piece of jewellery”; perfume that “cast its spell”; a “ménage à trois”; arriving home to find “an orgy in progress”; and an eyebrow-raising account of the first time he gave a woman an orgasm.
More interesting, though, is the push and pull of his acting career. It’s only when Williams is cast opposite Diana Ross in the 1972 Billie Holiday biopic Lady Sings The Blues that things fall into place for him professionally — and the book finds a throughline, too. Finally, he had found a role that responded to his obvious talents and excess of charisma, and he quickly became a sex symbol, at a time when roles for Black actors were largely limited to racist stereotypes. He is refreshing and honest — though rigorously level-headed — on his frustrations with an industry that never quite caught up with him: never interested in activism, always preferring to let the work speak for itself.
Just when it seemed like the roles weren’t there, along came Lando: the swashbuckling larger-than-life hero he had been looking for his whole life. Most of the stories here — that that he was beguiled by Carrie Fisher, that he was harangued by fans for Lando’s double-cross, that he walked his daughter down the aisle at her wedding to Darth Vader’s Imperial March — will be familiar to Star Wars fans, but it’s good to hear them direct from Williams. And he writes movingly about returning to the franchise for The Rise Of Skywalker in 2019. When J.J. Abrams asked him if he was ready to be Lando again, Williams’ response was perfect. “J.J.,” he said, “I’ve never not been Lando.”
VERDICT Though occasionally rather old-fashioned and meandering, this is still a relentlessly charming — and typically lascivious — portrait of an old smoothie.