The Legs Are the Last to Go (18 page)

I told her, “Well, at this point, it ain't difficult.”

One night she gave a small dinner party at her apartment. I was just back in New York after closing
Sunset
. When she was seating her guests, she said, “I want Vic to be at the head of my table!” I was shocked. We were still married. But I thought to myself that if she can be that rude, then she is probably very strong, and smart enough to know exactly how to make my husband very happy, and he's going to fall for it completely because she is very rich.

At the end of dinner, I told him I was going home alone.

I walked into the same apartment on Riverside Drive that I had decorated so zealously for Sidney, the husband who never materialized to live there with me so many years before. I could
not keep from looking back and feeling like an absolute failure. Sure, I had just triumphed in Toronto. But my marriages had been nothing but disastrous, and a successful marriage was still stuck in my head, my old-fashioned, proper-girl head, as the ultimate goal.

Separation had become the only option. And I had some thinking to do. It took a long time, but little by little, over the course of months, I started to feel a change. I asked myself, “What are you going to do with yourself when you get up in the morning, Diahann? Is it possible to be comfortable putting your two feet soundly on the floor and saying, ‘I'm single and I'm happy'? Because, my dear, there won't be any shoes under the bed other than your own! So why don't you try something new, and try living in a different way and keep the damn shoes away from the bed and see how it feels?”

And that's exactly what I did. It was not easy at first. But then it got easier and more pleasant. I found the majority of my time was spent with more interesting people who stimulated me and made me laugh. And we would do the kinds of things I liked doing, cultural things rather than singularly sports-related things, traveling to stimulating places rather than purely relaxing ones. And when I was at a party or dinner, I could look across a room and recognize the kind of person I'd want to talk to, and I would be able to talk to him or her without the burden of having to answer to someone on my arm.

There was no golf, and better yet, there was no jealousy or guilt or mind games.

And I thought to myself, “How wonderful that I can finally enjoy being alone!”

You know, ten years ago, I did not understand women who chose to be alone. But now, when I walk through my condo door after a lovely evening, it just feels marvelous. The other night I was coming back from an evening out, and as I was walking through my lobby—dressed to kill, I might add—a neighbor saw me and said, “Oh, don't you look wonderful, Diahann! We should have taken you with us!”

I didn't know what to say. Was she suggesting that I would have been happier going out with her and her husband than alone at dinner with my friends? There's an assumption in our society that a woman alone in a restaurant is lonely and that she needs a dinner partner, even if she has to rent one. I know women who do that.

It is a wonderful feeling to know your life is full just as it is.

That is not to say that I'm not open to relationships. I still have my beauty regimen before bed each night. I moisturize and brush my hair and enjoy my lovely lingerie.

It has taken some time to get to this present state of mind.

Some months after I left Vic with his lady in New York, I was back in Los Angeles, and I was still smarting from the loss of my marriage when I was sitting on the floor in the dark. I don't know why I had even bothered calling to tell Vic at that moment that I had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. I had already stressed him out with complaints about my injured leg from a fall I'd taken in
Sunset Boulevard
. I was, I guess, just a pain in the ass to him by that time. It just seemed that it was important health news to share with him, and I told him I didn't want him reading about it in the papers first. I wanted
him to know that this was happening to me and that it was not necessarily serious.

His reply was shocking. “Oh, shit! What next, Diahann?” he said. Then he slammed down the phone. Wouldn't that make your knees crumble and put you on the floor? I was alone. I had cancer and I was out of work.

I think I knew that I'd eventually land on my feet.

But that night I was flat out on my ass.