In the sort of hip world of New York, Carl Lee was the hip-black-actor icon. He was for hip people what Sidney Poitier was for mainstream people. He was the star of two of Shirley Clarke's films, he was the off-camera influence to her "Portrait of Jason," he did a legendary "Othello" at Stratford, Conn., and he was the son of Canada Lee, who had been one of the most famous black actors of the '30s and '40s. He had a huge effect on everyone who knew him.

Shirley Clarke's whole life revolved around Carl Lee; they had this on-and-off 30-year relationship and she totally supported him the whole time. His influence was a combination of language, style, personality and psychology. He was a great analyzer of human beings, particularly in their sexual and racial nature; he was a philosopher of sex and murder, talked about these subjects endlessly and always lived some kind of criminal life on the side. He had a magnificent baritone voice. He could sing, but he was an electric, hypnotic, evangelical speaker. He spoke in the rhythms of a great preacher, but his subject was casual sexual analysis, race, murder, crime, death and madness. He spoke beautifully and broadly and powerfully, with great emphasis, and looked you right in the eye. He would not have been capable of an ebonic moment.

The attraction was definitely physical, and stylistic and psychological. Did you ever read that strange little piece on Alain Delon I did in Projections 41/2? [Projections is a quality-paperback magazine devoted to filmmakers writing or talking about filmmaking.] In my first sentence I say, "I am not to my knowledge a homosexual." That would be the appropriate phrase to describe my response to Carl Lee.

It became a very unusual, interesting friendship, which lasted really until he died, which was the day he did his looping on [Toback's 1983 movie] "Exposed." He came to the studio to do his lines, and was clearly in the throes of one of his more intense and defeating heroin periods. He said that he desperately needed $50, which I gave him. He died of an overdose an hour later.

He had introduced me, indirectly and directly, to a whole world that I didn't know at all before. Among other things, it was a world of interracial sex. The life I led between the time I met him and the time that I met Jim Brown a decade later was affected more by him than anyone else.

Was Mailer's "White Negro" a big influence on you in this period?

It was a philosophical articulation of what I was already experiencing -- in the same way that reading Dostoevski's novella "The Gambler" didn't turn me into a compulsive gambler, but was an explanation to me of what was already going on. And reading Mailer, it wasn't just "The White Negro" -- it was reading [Mailer's 1965 book] "An American Dream," which had a character vaguely based on Miles Davis who might as well have been Carl Lee. In fact, two of the people I met through Carl were Miles Davis and Richard Pryor. Miles idolized Carl, rather than the other way around. Pryor was just getting started. The first night I met Pryor, Carl and Miles Davis and I were having dinner together and Carl was saying, "You've got to see this guy, he's unbelievable; he does this routine where he's a fetus and you follow the whole fetal development." And that was Richard Pryor, either at the Bitter End or the Village Vanguard, one of those clubs in the Village.

I met Jim Brown 10 years after I met Carl Lee, and he had a similar effect. I entered his world even more completely. But by the time I moved into Jim's house, I had a far more established identity of my own. I had much more confidence in myself. I had been through quite a bit more independently, both in the way I lived as an undergrad at Harvard [he graduated in 1966] and also in my marriage to a girl who was the granddaughter of [the] Duke of Marlborough. I had a lot of serious and rather jeopardizing gambling relationships and experiences.

So I certainly was coming to Jim Brown's house with a lot more sense of a developed self. Clearly not enough to pack it in and call it a day, or I wouldn't have been there in the first place. I still felt myself ready to experience a new world. Barry Levinson told me that when he saw "Black and White," it made him feel like he'd paid a fascinating visit to a foreign country. And that's how I felt when I entered Jim Brown's house. I was sufficiently intrigued and excited by it that I didn't want to leave -- and I didn't. I just stayed and stayed and stayed. Part of what was going on was just that I was learning a great deal in a lot of ways from Jim himself, which I tried to get at in my book ["Jim," Toback's admittedly self-centered portrait of Brown]. The rest of it was the world itself.

And that was different from the hip, cultured world of Carl Lee. It was a precursor to the superstar world that became the norm for black celebrities, or at least how they would be perceived.

That's right. It was the first time that black figures in sports, music and movies were really moving to the center of American life and were being allowed to engage in their freewheeling interracial sexual behavior without a lot of condemnation, not only from the white culture at large but from their own black community. I remember Rafer Johnson's affair with Gloria Steinem had a huge impact symbolically.

The paradox of "Black and White" is that while most adults will experience it as entering a foreign land, you leave thinking that everyone's kids are living in it -- and just not talking about it with their parents. With Carl Lee, you were in the avant-garde; with Jim Brown you were with a popular trailblazer. In this movie, though, you're talking about something incredibly widespread -- and, considering how widespread it is, little commented on.

Completely. That's one of the key distinctions between the White Negro and the whole hip-hop phenomenon happening today. Then, to be a white person crossing over, you were abandoning something that was a part of the central culture. You were at odds with it; you were ostracized from it. Now, if you're young and white and cross over to the black side, all you're doing is participating in what the white mainstream culture is. Unless you're talking about skinheads, you're not abandoning anybody. You're in effect straddling both sides, which is why Bijou Phillips says in the movie, "I can do whatever I want. I'm young in America." What she's really saying is, "I'm white in America and I can do what I want. I can go there and come back and be in both places at the same time."

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