The Legs Are the Last to Go (23 page)

It can be quite shocking. I remember one day when two women approached me at the dais after a talk I gave in Houston. They wanted to know if I would go home with them to speak to their mother personally. She was refusing to have a mammogram. She believed that there was nothing available to help fight cancer anyway, so why bother? In fact, this lady told her daughters that it wasn't even possible that someone famous like me would be coming to town to discuss her cancer. I actually considered going with these girls and making a personal appearance at their mother's home. But I also wondered if crossing that kind of boundary was a good idea. You can always do more, I guess. But in the end, someone from my organization got involved. I was just glad I was in a position to help at all.

In another city, I was giving my talk and explaining that a mammogram truck would be coming in on Thursday. A woman came up to me and asked, “Does that mean for black women, too?” Another asked if Asian women were included. I was just stunned to hear from women who believed they would be turned away from testing because of the color of their skin or the language they spoke. It's all so enlightening. I would probably never have the opportunities to visit these communities, learning so much about our country, if I had not had cancer.

One day I was at a hotel in Chicago, where I was shooting
The Delany Sisters
. I was eating breakfast very early in the morning before going off to the set, when three young ladies on the staff of the hotel approached to thank me for a radio spot I'd done. After they had heard it, they vowed to go get their mammograms together, and two of the three discovered they had breast cancer early. There we were, at dawn, three strangers, sharing something so important, lifesaving really. We were all cancer-free.

It's ironic: I'd spent my life on the road, and just when things were slowing down in my professional life, I found it necessary to speak in public to share my cancer experience with others. I'm still performing, too, of course, concerts, nightclubs, and the like. I have to admit that at this stage of my life, it's a shot in the arm to know that hundreds and sometimes thousands of people want to come hear me.

It's been ten years since I had cancer, and they say that after seven or eight years you're pretty much in the clear. But I have never felt completely at ease. Each time I go for a mammogram, it makes me anxious, and when the appointment in my book tells me I have one on Thursday at 3
P.M.
, I am tense until the moment I hear “you're fine.” I worry for those around me, too. Like Nigel, who had been so good to me when I was going through treatment (even as he was finding out that he had cancer himself). We sit together, alone or with Sharon, his friend, having drinks and holding hands. Often it is on my terrace around sunset, when the Hollywood Hills outside my window are glowing.

The other day he called and asked, “Is it the golden hour yet?”

He lives nearby, and knows he doesn't have to ask if it's convenient to come over. He knows he can just come. And so we sit, enjoying the magnificent view. Nigel is a gentleman, younger than me and Caribbean-born and-raised, with the most beautiful lilt in his voice that only adds to his charm and dignity. The only time we ever had an argument was when he was complaining about the hospital where he was going for his cancer treatment. I had never heard of it and made it my business to badger him until he changed hospitals. Now he's much more comfortable and confident that everything that can be done is being done. But we don't talk about our health all that much. We're enough at ease with each other to know we don't have to discuss it. It's a tribute to his character, I think, that Nigel has not become his illness, and continues to delight everyone he knows. If there's something he needs to share, he shares it. He still has his wicked humor. And he hasn't lost one ounce of his capacity to enjoy life.

We enjoy a glass of wine or a cocktail with tinkling ice in our glasses and warmest thoughts in our hearts. No doctor has told us we can't have our cocktails. So we're having a good time for now, no matter what the future may bring. One evening when I was feeling low—it was my birthday—he put on a Tony Bennett record in my living room and asked me, “May I have this dance?” It was as therapeutic as any treatment. When you are ill, friends are a very potent and necessary form of therapy.

Cocktails, indeed. Just as I'm reluctant to give up my high heels, I am not one to give up my cocktails. Besides, with the news today touting red wine as good for cholesterol counts, and doctors recommending that a couple of drinks a day may be
more beneficial than detrimental to your health, perhaps they are just as healthful as the pomegranate juice I drink for its antioxidants. Who knows? But I do try to stay in good condition so that if anything goes wrong again, I'll be strong enough to fight it. The stronger you are, the better shape you're in, the more chance you'll have of surviving whatever hits you in your senior years.

Since cancer, I also find that I am far more conscious of how I'm spending my days. What do I want to do? And with whom? I make more time for friends than I ever have before. Most importantly, I cherish every moment that I have with my grandchildren and their mother—my daughter, Suzanne. A few years ago, she was visiting me in Los Angeles on her birthday, when she told me she had not had her mammogram. Although she always wanted to make her own way in the world without my string pulling, she was happy that I suggested she could get to be seen right away at a private facility that I use. You're in and out of there quickly, and best of all, you get your results right away. So I went with her and sat in the waiting room, and even as I delighted in reading books to my grandchildren and marveled at their excellent waiting-room manners, I worried intensely about what was going on inside with the exam. This was, after all, the place where I first got the news of my breast cancer. Would the doctor find something on my daughter's breast, and then ask to call another doctor? You always dread that. Fortunately, this was not necessary. Instead, the doctor came out to see me in the waiting room. And we hugged. Here I was in the very place where ten years before I had first heard the news of my own cancer, and I had to hold back some tears, but they were tears of joy.

© Adger W. Cowan

I'VE BEEN NOMINATED FOR OSCARS AND EMMY
awards. And I've won a Tony and a Golden Globe. But a nomination for Best Performance as a Mother was never even a remote possibility. I was always a hardworking woman and my daughter, Suzanne, always had to pay the price. These days, actresses often wisely take a break from their careers so that they can raise their children. But as one of the few consistently working blacks of my day in Hollywood and on Broadway, I was too caught up in the money and impact I was making to understand how important it is for a mother to put her child above all else.

I mean, can you imagine having Diahann Carroll as your mother? My daughter, Suzanne, had to share me with a very demanding career, and, as a little girl, watch me go off to work all over the country, leaving her with her nanny for half her childhood. To make matters more difficult for her, I've always been the kind of show-business person who tends to be “on”
most of the time. It makes intimacy harder to achieve with an innocent and vulnerable child. But then, I've seen very few people of my generation in politics or show business who know how to drop the “on” persona, even in private. It's not that we know we're behaving that way. There's just a built-in tendency to charm any room, and get as much attention as possible, even though nobody's paying a dime for the show. Of course, when you spend as much time as I do preparing to look good in public, people do notice you. I suppose some children might have enjoyed it. Not Suzanne. But to her credit, she has gotten over any issues that built up over the years.

The primary cause of our reconciliation has come in the form of her children, my grandchildren. Nothing in my life has prepared me for the sheer joy of them and in watching Suzanne develop as a mom. She has shown herself to be a fantastic hands-on mother of two. Oh, the joy she elicits from her children! It reminds me of the laughs she and I had together when she was still very young. In our earliest days, there were many delicious moments. How could we not have them while traveling on the road together?

One of the stories I love to tell is about the time she used Frank Sinatra as a desk. In 1964, she would have been four years old. I had brought her to the set of
The Dean Martin Show,
which was not exactly a child-oriented situation, with all the smoking, foul language, carousing, and martini swigging that was needed to inspire the entertainment. Plus, shooting live television is never relaxed, but rather very intense, with as much hustle and bustle backstage as any Broadway show, if not more. Somehow I succeeded in making a deal with
the producers that Suzanne could be there as long as she was quiet.

She was quiet. But that didn't mean she would sit still. She was much too sociable a child for that. She was unafraid, and felt it was her right to engage anyone on hand in coloring with her crayons. I was backstage listening to something Dean was singing, and Suzanne quietly left my side to walk over to Sinatra, who was sitting in a chair, being quiet as well. He was wearing a suit and tie and hat, as I recall. Suzanne didn't care that this man was not dressed for arts-and-crafts time. Nor did she care that he was one of the nation's greatest celebrities. In her most methodical manner, she quietly uncrossed his legs and put her coloring book on his lap. Then she walked back over to me to get her crayons. He didn't move, and when she returned to him, she started to color, very intently and quietly. He never moved. She kept coloring. Eventually, the whole room became aware of it happening, and I was about to leap up and rescue him.

He put his hands to his lips to indicate he didn't want me to disturb her.

I, of course, loved him for that for the rest of his life.

And for Suzanne, it was just another take-your-daughter-to-work day.

She was used to it. For her first Christmas, she joined me in France for the filming of
Paris Blues.
Never mind that Sidney was to be my romantic interest. As I said, I simply could not say no to a film that was so intent on lending dignity to the conversation about race in America at the time. But for the first part of the shoot, Suzanne was too young to travel, and I missed her so
much that I made a fuss at Orly Airport as soon as her plane landed. In those days, you could still greet arriving passengers at the gate. I stood with a crowd, trying to get a glimpse of her as I jumped up and down. She was with my parents and my husband Monte. It was taking a long time for them to get security clearance. I was frantic. “What is the matter, madam?” an attendant asked me.

“You don't understand,” I shrieked. “That's my baby there!”

I was so unmoored that they ran ahead to bring her to me.

The entire family occupied a three-bedroom suite at the Hôtel de La Trémoille on that trip. My parents were very impressed, watching how unafraid I was to ask for anything on my child's behalf—in my very poor French, I might add. They had grown up in an era when African-Americans were made to feel they couldn't make any demands at all. So seeing their daughter behave as I did, so confident and unapologetic, made a big impression.

Suzanne, at age two, was on the road with me again in 1962. The entire company of
No Strings
was on a train headed to Detroit, for an out-of-town tryout. In those days, train travel was still relatively formal and fabulous, or at least it was for us. Suzanne had a nanny, Mary, and along with my assistant and entourage, we were quite a formidable group, with a beyond-formidable amount of luggage. I made sure we had lots of berths for all of us, and that my little daughter had full run of them. Imagine her delight. And when it was time for supper, Suzanne was all dressed up and looking so adorable that there wasn't a person in the dining car who didn't fall in love with her.

One evening, during cocktail hour, she was running around the parlor car in a perfect little red velvet dress. Richard Rodgers walked in, dressed impeccably, as always, in a well-cut dark suit, white shirt, and tie. He saw Suzanne and laughed, then picked her up and started talking to her and getting very involved. Who knows what those two were talking about. I couldn't hear over the sound of the train. But of course I was pleased and impressed. What young mother wouldn't be? In those days men had very little to do with children who weren't their own, and it was so lovely to see this rapport. But after a while, I had to interrupt to say, “I'm looking at the time and I think you should put her down now.” Mr. Rodgers ignored me and sat down in a banquette to continue playing. “It's her bedtime, Mr. Rodgers,” I repeated. “And I think you'd best put her down now.”

He still ignored me. And that's when she peed in his lap.

Later, when we were rehearsing in New York, I was backstage one day when I looked over and found my leading man, Richard Kiley, passing Suzanne around.

“Isn't she cute?” he was saying as he gave her to another cast member, who then gave her to another one. “Put your hand on her head.”

I walked up to him and shot him a withering look.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Well, you know it's good luck to touch a colored baby's head, Diahann,” he said.

I grabbed her away from him faster than you could say “Do you want to die?”

“Get your hands off my child,” I said.

Poor Richard Kiley. He was so alarmed.

“What's the problem, Diahann?” he asked.

“That is unacceptable,” I said. “Unless you're going to let me put my hand on a white child's head to bring me good luck because she's white, you can't do it to my child because she's black. Don't ever do that again!”

“I never heard it was unacceptable,” he said.

“Well then, I'll be the first to tell you,” I replied.

I do think that the exposure to the magical backstage world of show business taught Suzanne to be at ease in all kinds of situations. She became very comfortable anywhere we went, and could actually be very assertive. If she needed help coloring or tying her shoe, she'd enlist anyone who was handy. One time I sent for her when she was about five, while I was performing in Vegas. I was very worried while waiting for her at the train station. Imagine a time when there were no cell phones to keep nervous young mothers updated at every moment of a trip. When the train pulled in and people were disembarking at the Las Vegas depot, several looked at me, smiled wearily, and volunteered, “She's on the train!” She had made herself very well known. She stepped from the train in her little blue wool overcoat, looking ready for a visit to the White House. It felt like heaven having her there. When we arrived at my suite, she settled right in. She was accustomed to hotels, and immediately asked, “Is this my room?” We set up a suite for her as her play space, with a little table and chairs. And when there were other children around on set, we would invite them up to play school.

Wherever we went, we'd set up house for weeks at a time.
There would be a nanny, and sometimes my mother, and in later years a teacher. I'd come back from work tired and in need of resting my voice. She wanted my full attention. Thank heavens she enjoyed the company of Louise Adamo, my assistant for over thirty years, whose sense of humor and love of children were obvious. Louise was a happy addition to our family. But Suzanne still had to spend a great deal of lonely time in hotels.

I remember one of Suzanne's last moments of true innocence while traveling with me, before things started to change between us.

We had started the national tour of
No Strings
. She was backstage in the wings during a run-through, and was two years old, old enough to understand that she was to stand still when I told her to. So there she stood (with my wardrobe mistress) watching me with her big eyes as I stepped into the spotlight and sang a number after which I'd return to her open arms in the wings. The day it all changed was when a stage manager who adored her (there wasn't anyone who didn't) made the mistake of picking her up and taking her from backstage to the front of the theater. There were producers and friends in the audience watching the rehearsal. She saw them, then she turned in the aisle to see me onstage in a spotlight and yelled at the top of her little lungs, “Wait! That's my mommy!” It was the first time she saw me as the performer on a stage, really. Who were all those strangers paying such rapt attention to her mother, the one person in the world who she thought was for her and her alone? After she yelled, the entire production buckled under with laughter. It took a long time for everyone to calm down.

And it took decades to undo the damage my career would
cause us in the years ahead. Of course it did not help that a year after her birth, I had asked her father for a divorce. Fortunately, he stayed firmly in her life, and was more of a rock to her than I could ever be. But it never occurred to me to allow her to live with him. In those days, a mother had to have her child with her.

When Suzanne reached school age, I enrolled her in the elite Lycée Français on the Upper East Side. This school was supported by the Kennedys. The curriculum was adapted for traveling families and the children of international businessmen and diplomats. I hired tutors who were recommended by the school. I'd receive reviews from the headmistress that my darling daughter was bright and always did well and seemed to enjoy her assignments.

But even as she succeeded with her schoolwork and was exposed to the exciting world of show business, I was concerned that being on the road was not the best thing for her. Eventually, the school confirmed my concerns. When she was seven, the headmistress called to tell me how hard it was for children to constantly be pulled away from school. They can't build relationships or bond with friends, and indeed, when Suzanne returned to school after being on the road with me, she was disoriented. Other children were forming alliances without her. It could be a nightmare for any child.

Not that it was all great when we were home. “Mommy, why don't you bake cookies?” Suzanne once asked me. I told her I wasn't that kind of mother. I was more eager to buy the best cookies in New York for her. I'd often return from rehearsals only to learn I'd missed suppertime and bath time, too. She
doesn't remember that I read her stories at night whenever I could. But it wasn't enough and I knew it. At the Central Park Petting Zoo one afternoon, we were pursued by fans. Standing between me and them, she told them, “Please go away! This is
my
mommy.”

Of course she was absolutely right. I should have learned to tell people, “I'm sorry, but this is family time.” There's a photograph taken around that time, a fashion shoot for a magazine, since I was wearing a full-length fur coat on the beach in the middle of summer: mother and child are standing together at water's edge. The sea is behind us. My fake eyelashes are casting shadows on my cheekbones, and my hair is piled very high. I look absolutely preposterous, pretentious, and untouchable, fashion-model style. In front of me stands my little girl, age six or so, in a darling ruffled bikini. I have an imperious look on my face to rival that of Nefertiti. She is a little, long-haired, natural beauty of the kind that Gauguin might have painted. But the look in her eyes is not tranquil. She stands up against me protectively, as if she were trying to keep the camera away.

The worst possible thing for our relationship was to have to leave her at home. But my work called. In the mid-1960s, as I've said, I was part of a group of blacks who were breaking into the entertainment industry in new ways. Sammy Davis Jr., Harry Belafonte, Nat King Cole, Sidney Poitier, Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt—we were riding something wonderful and giving a guilty and conflicted nation what they wanted to see. So eight weeks in Tahoe or Vegas? Yes. Role in a sophisticated film? How could I say no? Guest appearance on
What's My Line?
or the
Steve Allen Show
? What about flying to Hollywood for
The Danny Kaye Show, Hollwood Palace, Carol Burnett,
or any special that wanted me? Of course! It would have been too difficult not to accept the heady opportunities of that moment.