Throughout his career, James Baldwin had a hankering to work in show business. Like Henry James, one of his early heroes, Baldwin loved the footlights; early on, with his friend and editor Sol Stein, he collaborated on a still unproduced television script based on his 1955 essay "Equal in Paris." For a while, the Harlem-raised writer worked with the director Elia Kazan, as the latter prepared Tennessee Williams's "Sw…
