Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 2, Summer 2000 | Page 35

Dorothy Dandridge’s Photograph 31 Thus, Dandridge’s photo allows us to vacillate on this continuum between the there-and-then and the here-and-now as we seek to foreground an individual backgrounded by time and history. More recently Carol Mavor, drawing upon the previous scholars in the same vein, argues that not only is death connected to photography because it seizes a moment in time but death or the '‘morbid sense of mortality” can be read in a photograph (Mavor 49). Mavor explores how death is captured in photographs through sleep and the positioning of the body. Thus, Mavor’s reading gives further significance to the representation of death in Dandridge’s photograph. An examination of the death of Dandridge as constructed in this photo must of course take into account Dandridge’s alleged suicide and the circumstances surrounding her death. These underlie the discursiveness of this photo and call for a recapitulation of the story of her death. Some four months prior to her death, Dandridge left a note outlining her will. Reprinted in the New York Times, it read. In the case of death - to whomever [sic] discovers it - don’t remove anything 1 have on - scarf, gown, or other....Cremate me right away - if I have anything, money, furniture give to my mother Ruby Dandridge. She will know what to do. Dorothy Dandridge (“Forty-four Word Handwritten Will o f Miss Dandridge Filed” 58). That Dandridge outlined her will only a few months prior to her death, and considering that she had been diagnosed as suicidal gives credence to the view that she may have had premonitions and even a predilection toward her own death. Her death is still shrouded in mystery because of the multiple theories that persist regarding how she died. When Dandridge was found dead in her apartment (8 September 1965), conflicting reports circulated: she died from an injury, or her death was caused by murder, suicide, or drug intoxication. Following Dandridge’s death, the Los Angeles Coroner’s office, allegedly under pressure to release a report on her death, produced a preliminary finding suggesting that because she had suffered a broken bone in her foot resulting from an injury sustained in a gym several days prior to her death, fragments of the bone infiltrated her blood stream and may have caused her death (“A Fracture Fatal to Miss Dandridge” 27). In an amendment to her death certificate, authorities later revealed that Dandridge’s cause of death was from acute drug intoxication from the ingestion of Trofranil, an anti depressant that apparently had been prescribed for her because of her severe bouts with depression (Death Certificate). Her friends insisted that Dandridge was murdered, they refused to believe that suicide was the cause of her death (Robinson 72). Thus, the complexity of Dandridge’s death itself enhances the symbolism of her photo.