Ike Jones

Ike Jones was a producer, actor, screenwriter and second-unit director best known as being the "secret" husband of movie star Inger Stevens, whom he claimed he had married in Mexico in 1961 after Stevens' apparent suicide in 1970. The marriage supposedly was kept secret in order not to damage Stevens career, as she was white and he was black. Sammy Davis Jr.'s romance with Kim Novak in the late 1950s had been terminated by the intervention of Columbia Pictures production chief Harry Cohn (Novak's boss), who used his mob connections to threaten Davis. When Davis married May Britt in 1960, her once promising career stalled, so such concerns were legitimate. Since the marriage had been secret, Jones had to battle in court for his rights to Stevens' estate (worth an estimated $110,000 (approximately $800,000 in 2022 dollars). His claim was supported by Stevens' brother. Born Isaac Lolette Jones in Santa Monica, California, on December 23, 1929 he was the first African American graduate from the UCLA film school when he took his diploma in 1952. He also became the first African American to produce an A-List Hollywood movie when he produced A Man Called Adam (1966) in 1966. He would also be the first person to receive the Oscar Micheaux Award, named after the trail-blazing African American producer, director and writer, by the Producers Guild of America in 1995. Ike had played college football at UCLA and was drafted by the Green Bay Packers in 1953, but he was set on making a career in the movies. He made his debut as an actor in '53 in The Kid from Left Field (1953) and also appeared in The Joe Louis Story (1953), on which he also toiled as an assistant director. His acting career was over by 1960 (though it revived briefly in the period 1973-75), as he became the head of Nat 'King' Cole's Kell-Cole Productions. He has made his bones as an executive working at the Hill-Hecht-Lancaster production company in the 1950s and then as vice president of Harry Belafonte's Harbel Productions.[5] He made cinema history when Sammy Davis, Jr. hired him to produce A Man Called Adam (1966). He only produced one more production, the 1978 TV movie A Woman Called Moses (1978) starring Cicely Tyson as Harriet Tubman, and served as an executive producer on the 1981 TV movie The Oklahoma City Dolls (1981).