The Legs Are the Last to Go (4 page)

“Thank you all so very much for a lovely performance. I enjoyed it very much. My pilot has just informed me that the skies are clouding over and that I must leave immediately, but again, thank you for a fine show.” There was dead silence everywhere.

We had all worked so hard on this show and we were really disappointed. The cast so wanted to meet him, be around him for a half hour. That's how actors are. We try our best to interpret the work of important artists every single night,
and it would have just been so wonderful to be able to greet him. I was also looking forward to burying any ill will between us. But he was gone, just gone. I was demolished and demoralized. You do feel responsible for the company when you're the star of the show. And I just couldn't believe he would do that.

On the other hand, I'd been the leading lady in a similar situation years ago with the great Richard Rodgers. Actually, it was worse.

It happened in Detroit. I was working extremely hard in 1962 for the out-of-town opening of the Broadway-bound
No Strings
. And the night before we opened, Mr. Rodgers came to see me in my dressing room. In a voice that was something between avuncular and condescending, he told me he had something he needed to discuss with me: the hostess of our opening-night party did not want me in her home. She felt that it would confuse her children to see a black woman who was sophisticated and elegant because they didn't exist. She told Rodgers she was certain he'd hired tutors to teach me diction and manners, and that I was a fabricated black character who was designed to startle white audiences. Did Rodgers, who wrote “You've Got to Be Carefully Taught” about prejudice for
South Pacific,
argue with this racist hostess or give her a dressing-down? Did he tell her to cancel her party? No, he did neither. Well, I'd seen him be cruel in the past. Once in his office, he referred to Larry Hart, one of his former collaborators, as a fag. Another time, I ran into him in front of our hotel, again while we were trying out
No Strings
in Detroit. It was a rainy day, and when he asked how I was doing, I told
him I was having a terrible time getting a cab. He said, “Oh, that's too bad,” and then went and left in his limo without offering me a ride to the theater. It amazes me when people who have the ability to create such beautiful music can behave so rudely.

At any rate, when he told me that I would not be invited to the cast party, I wasn't really surprised. After all, when you live a life in which racial prejudice is a daily experience, you carry with you a mental first-aid kit to fix any situation to avoid further infection of your soul. So I had my assistant call a favorite restaurant across the street from our theater, and reserved it for our private party. Everyone in the cast and crew was invited. We had a ball. We ate and drank, hugging one another and praising one another and giving one another the kind of support we needed after so many weeks of difficult rehearsals. And I never chose to speak of the incident again with Mr. Rodgers. I have never understood the point of dwelling on things that are so blatantly obvious. And besides, I could not withdraw from the theater opportunity of a lifetime.

Mr. Rodgers had called me on the telephone to introduce the idea of
No Strings
in 1961. He had loved my work in Capote and Arlen's
House of Flowers,
and a few years later, in 1957, had tried to make me up to look Asian for
Flower Drum Song,
a look that didn't work. I knew he had wanted to work with me for years, and I was excited. The morning he called was after one of my appearances on
The Tonight Show
with Jack Paar, where I was becoming a regular—a great boon to my public profile. For my meeting with Mr. Rodgers, I went in
a pale pink Givenchy suit and pillbox hat. It was a perfect choice. “You look marvelous,” he said. “That's exactly how I want you to look onstage in my show.” And so I did. In
No Strings,
I played an American model in Paris who falls in love with an American writer played by Richard Kiley. We have a glorious, glamorous fling (that only ends when he has to go back to the States) in a bonbon of a beautifully designed show. It meant the world to be able to depict a black woman with some sophistication, and it was especially gratifying to know I was part of the first integrated love affair on Broadway. This was Rodgers's first project without a lyricist, it was a solid hit, and I won a Tony Award. My competitors for the prize in 1962 were Anna Marie Alberghetti, Molly Picon, and Elaine Stritch.

And
No Strings
was an almost perfect experience. I say almost perfect because show business is never without its regrettable moments. The cast party in Detroit was one. The other came in the days after I received my Tony Award, and I opened the papers to find out that Nancy Kwan, an Asian-American actress, had been cast to play my role in the Warner Brothers film version of the show. Yes, Audrey Hepburn had replaced Julie Andrews for the film version of
My Fair Lady,
just as Andrews would replace Mary Martin for the film version of
The Sound of Music
. But this was different. I wasn't too old for the part in the movie, just too black. Around that time, I had testified for Adam Clayton Powell Jr. about limited opportunities for black performers. In the wake of the news about
No Strings,
the NAACP sent a petition to Warner Bros., demanding to know how many black people it employed. Several groups threatened
to boycott the film. The studio eventually decided to shelve the project.

It was devastating to be unwelcome at a cast party and the movie version of a show that had been written for me. But by then, I already knew how cruel show business could be. The great Pearl Bailey was the one who taught me my very first lesson about these immense cruelties in show business. In
House of Flowers,
she played a madam in a West Indian bordello who helps raise Ottilie, the young ingenue I was playing. Despite all odds (and sense, when I look back on it now), Ottilie remains lovely, innocent, and pure.

I was nineteen at the time, and looked rather innocent myself. I suppose that's why Pearl became so maternal. I don't think she knew that I didn't really need any mothering, given that I had such an attentive and loving mother. But Pearl was very sweet to me. Then, suddenly she wasn't. We were still in rehearsals on the road. And on the show's opening night in Philadelphia, I decided to apply a little eyeliner on my eyelids so the audience would notice my eyes, a standard routine for any theater actress. But before the curtain went up, and in the kind of loud, dramatic voice I had worked to eliminate from my own persona, I heard her on the other side of the theater. The whole cast and crew heard her, too. “That girl is covered in makeup,” she was yelling. “This show will not go on until she removes every last bit of it, do you hear me?” To be honest, I didn't even know whom she was talking about. So I couldn't believe it when the stage manager walked over to me, and with a sheepish voice said I'd have to wash my face. It was mortifying. But I didn't argue. I knew what was going on. She was
threatened by my youth, and wanted to keep me as barefoot and dowdy as possible.

“So that's what it means to be the star,” I told myself as I washed my face.

Then it got worse. I had a beautiful song in the show called “Don't Like Goodbyes.” It was Harold Arlen at his finest, and the audience was wild for the song. After a performance in our out-of-town rehearsals, there was a knock on my door. The producer, Saint-Suber, and Mr. Arlen were standing there. He was a terribly dapper-looking man, but he was also nurturing, and spoke to performers with respect and kindness. This was, in fact, a man whose personality was equal to the loving and idealistic songs he wrote.

“This is going to sound awful, and it isn't very pleasant, so get ready,” he said. “And I have to apologize because we never should have allowed this to happen.”

My heart skipped several beats. What could this be? I knew I wasn't being fired.

Then the producer quietly said, “We're going to have to take the song ‘Don't Like Goodbyes' away from you. Pearl wants to sing it.”

I didn't say what I wanted to say, which was, “Are you all crazy?”

I might have suggested that the song would make no sense if her character sang it. But I knew the rules well by then—don't argue with the star. So I didn't cry or carry on at all. I simply told myself that there was nothing to be done about this situation. If there's something that you can do, then you have to fight for it. Or maybe you get the people you are paying to do
the fighting for you. But this? Nothing to be done about it. She wanted my song.

So it was decided that to help the song make sense, I would remain onstage as Miss Bailey sang it to me. The director put me at her feet. I was looking out to the audience, wistfully, as she sang:

 

Don't like goodbyes,

Tears or sighs…

 

She was playing the loving woman who had adopted me, and I was this girl whom she had raised to become a lady. It was decided that I would rest my face on her lap and she would tenderly rub my cheeks and forehead as I looked outward and she sang the song that was one of the most beautiful I'd ever heard, a song that gave me chills when I sang it. But the first night she sang my song, she took my head into both her hands, and slowly but forcefully turned my face completely upstage, away from the audience, and then she buried my face in her ample lap.

 

I'm not too good at leavin' time…

I got no taste for grievin' time

 

While breathing into the fabric of her dress, I waited for her to lift my face back up so I could continue breathing freely and looking out at the audience. But it soon became clear that she was going to keep my head placed right there where she de
cided it should be. I wanted to bite her, but I told myself, “You can't change this, leave it alone.” And when the song ended, and she had let me go, I heard the audience applaud her instead of me. Everyone tried to convince her it made no sense for her character to sing that song.

“No, it's fine,” she said. “We'll leave it just like it is.”

So, as I say, show business can be cruel.
Sunset Boulevard
epitomizes that, and Norma Desmond is an example of what it's like to fight with the fact that you are getting older. Well, we do have a terrible problem with age in this country. But you know what? I think it's ridiculous for older women to allow themselves to be so demoralized. Say what you want about Norma, at least she had the wherewithal to try to get someone to write a script for her so she could have a role to play. She did what she could, and only when she realizes that she is no longer wanted, not by Hollywood and not by her young man, does she have her famous “ready for my close-up” meltdown scene. I'm glad that I've figured out at this tender age that public recognition is not the most important thing in life. I'm glad I have friends around to laugh with me and discuss the pros and cons of liposuction and other pertinent issues of the day. It's a lot more fun. On the other hand, imagine how gratifying it was for me, at the end of that show in that theater in Toronto, to stand at the top of a staircase and go stark raving mad? That scene is the perfect fulfillment for any actress who has spent her life in the industry.

Well, in a way, I really was going mad at the time. Things with Vic Damone, my fourth husband, were falling apart. In
my
Sunset Boulevard
interviews at the time, I'd joke about how wonderful it was to play Norma Desmond.

“She goes mad and shoots a man eight times a week,” I'd say.

I was only half joking.

Diahann Carroll and mother, Mabel Johnson, at the Alzheimer's Disease Research and Patient Care Fundraising Gala, Beverly Hills, March 2, 1985. (Photograph by Ron Galella/WireImage)

SO HOW DOES A GIRL FROM HARLEM GROW UP TO BE
a doyenne of stage, screen, and TV, with a penchant for couture, coiffure, Rolls-Royces, and the great composers of her time? In the tradition of so many memoirs, you can blame it all on my mother. She is the woman who made it her business to nurture me so completely as a child that I felt beautiful and special from the start. She lived a long life. When she died in 1999, I was already in my sixties, a senior citizen myself. The day of her passing, I didn't pause for even a moment to reflect on how important she'd been to me. I didn't cry, either. I simply flew into combat mode, the way I do when I'm pulling one of my shows together for the road, and I started making the funeral arrangements. I told the young woman at the funeral parlor that I would bring in all my mother's personal makeup, everything she had, “And I want you to make her look like a movie star.” She never liked having gray hair, but she had no choice but to let it go gray in her last year. So I had it dyed black for the
funeral—just the way she liked it. The makeup job was subtle. The color of her outfit was not. I put her in a military red Diahann Carroll suit, a color she always loved in her favorite designer label.

I guess I wasn't, at that moment, able to accept the loss of someone who had always been such a presence in my life. And I wasn't ready to accept the fact that we had all kinds of issues that remained unresolved right to the end. Or perhaps I should say I had all these issues with her that I'd never resolved for myself. It's strange. I am a woman known in my profession for having a level head. To survive in show business, especially when race is part of the scenario, it helps to keep calm. But just thinking about my mother, all these years after she's gone, still makes me feel flustered, like a child who cannot figure out how to get her point across to the most important person in her life.

“Mom!” I hear myself saying over and over. “You don't understand!”

Are there any more familiar words between mothers and daughters?

Why did I need to harangue her so much, to lecture her about things her old-fashioned soul didn't want to accept? Did I have to hold her responsible for so many of my failings as a woman and a wife? Was it necessary to shake her up with every little thing I'd learned about myself in psychotherapy? And could I not have allowed her a few more indulgences in the accessories department? Maybe I didn't need to tease her quite so much about her big earrings. She was a simple, polite, churchgoing lady who liked to do things properly. Okay, well, maybe not that properly, when the truth came out. But I didn't
discover all that about her until much later in our lives. My mother!

She did look fabulous in her casket. I wouldn't have had it any other way.

Some people might say I'm too image-conscious. They don't think that walking around in beaded dresses and heels adds up to a meaningful life. I don't do that every day. But I do it more than your average senior citizen. What can I say? It pleases me to know I've been on the International Best Dressed list twice in my life. I want to make the best entrance I possibly can. Just as I select songs for my cabaret performances carefully, I select wardrobe with great attention to detail. Materialistic? Of course it is. I'm nothing if not materialistic, and have been since I was young. My idea of a good time is shopping, and nobody is going to make me feel guilty about it. And I don't care what today's actresses tell you about having their best times in jeans and T-shirts, they are as image-conscious as those of us who grew up with a more studied idea of style.

Blame it on the movies, if you like. I grew up watching MGM musicals, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Lena Horne, all women who were concerned with looking smashing, not natural. Then there was the woman who schooled me early on in the ways of style—my mother. She was a high-school-educated woman with a highly developed sense of dignity, and she was on a mission to make me aware of how good I looked.

My confidence, my drive, and care about my personal style all come from her.

We didn't have much money, but, oh, did we have style!

My parents were practically children themselves when they met in 1931 at a carnival on Long Island. My father had just come up to New York from Aiken, South Carolina. My mother was just up from Bladenboro, North Carolina, and had been looking for work, with the encouragement of her own hardworking mother, while on her summer vacation. She was twenty-one, he was twenty, and working as a lithographic printer as well as a caddie on Long Island golf courses. He did not have anything beyond an elementary school education, and she only got as far as high school. But they had charming smiles, social grace, a relentless urge to escape the South and improve their lives, and, well, to be frank, a healthy attraction to the opposite sex. They liked each other right away. “That's the man I'm going to marry,” my mother told a cousin when she first saw my father.

Mabel Faulk, my mother, was striking. She had great cheekbones, her mother's almond-toned skin, and smoky, intriguing eyes. Her features were well proportioned and she had a shape that was coveted at the time—ample breasts, small waist, and full hips. She was never thin, but always voluptuous, with the most lovely legs. She wore shorts until she was eighty-two years old, bless her, and her hair was always thick and dark. She knew she was attractive and she worked it. Her glance was more solicitous than seductive. At any rate, men always looked.

My father, John Johnson, was always a looker. He was a man's man—tall and solid, and powerful in stature, with warm amber skin, a strong nose and mouth, and piercing, animated eyes. He was never much of a talker. A black boy
raised in the South by a quick-tempered father learns how to keep his mouth shut. A black boy who was once almost set on fire by racists in his hometown, learning that he cannot find relief in justice by telling anyone the truth about something so awful, keeps his anger locked inside, and adapts to a world in which to get along, you make yourself as agreeable as possible. At any rate, he was always a charmer, and the ladies always responded.

Well, how do you resist a man in houndstooth pants, a crisp white shirt, and spit-shined wingtip shoes? Even at ninety-six, he was a dignified flirt.

He wasn't looking to settle down when he met my mother but “she was nice, real nice,” he liked to say about her with the same sly smile that often appeared when he remembered her. He was just getting used to being on his own, breathing easy, for once in his life, out from under the punitive hand of his father. He and my mother married in 1933, in a small ceremony at Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church. The highly influential Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr., whose son became the powerful congressman years later, officiated. The newlywed Mr. and Mrs. Johnson were drawn to Harlem, in the heyday of its renaissance. It lured so many young blacks eager to join its rich and vibrant culture. “Back then, it was the only place to be,” my father told me.

John found a small apartment for himself and his new bride on West 151st Street, not too far from the storied 409 Edgecombe Avenue, where W. E. B. DuBois and Thurgood Marshall were among the famous tenants. Because my father's salary, as a printer and caddie, was not enough for two, my
mother had to find work doing housework. My father couldn't stand the idea of his wife having to work. It was a symbol of his inability to support his family. To him, a man wasn't a man unless he could do that. By his careful calculations, he needed to look for another job.

A year and a half into the marriage, in 1935, I came along. Ta-da. Carol Diann Johnson, a surprise baby. With my arrival, John's search for a better job became urgent. In their brief time together, John had seen Mabel's independence and fiery spirit. When her labor started after an argument, Mabel, in a fit of anger and spite, drove herself to a Bronx hospital to have me. Eventually, John got the call at work, and he had to race uptown to find his wife and greet me properly. My parents really were children in so many ways. Not that I'm one to talk, given my naive ways around men my whole life. But my parents' immaturity eventually did make marriage difficult, especially in later years. Yet they were such a wonderful team, too, from early on.

They were strivers, up-and-comers. My father had set his sights on a better job than working at a printing shop, and wanted to work for the city's subway system, one of the few places a black man could find decent pay, security, and benefits. My mother helped him study for the transit test he had to take. I remember when I was about five, watching them at our kitchen table, the boisterous life of the Harlem streets right outside our window, as they pored over papers with the quiet diligence of scholars. Dad passed the test, and landed a job with benefits, his first, making change in token booths. It was 1940. At the time, a ride cost five cents.

So now my parents, the Johnsons, were moving up in the world. They had a strong desire to live and socialize among the African-American upper crust, who for the most part had parlayed their lighter skin and straighter hair into better opportunities. But unfortunately, in the rarefied world of exclusive black social clubs like The Jack and Jill and The Links, where looks could influence social standing, John and Mabel Johnson were missing the key attribute that would have unlocked all the doors for them. Yes, my mother was light-skinned, and my father could have made it through the “paper-bag test,” meaning you could be no darker in skin color than a paper bag, but they did not have that all-essential college education to prove their worth. Without that, they were left on the outside of the Harlem society they craved to join. But their alienation made them determined to see that their own children would not face those kind of barriers and limitations.

They did only one thing in my entire childhood that made me feel unloved. When I was still a toddler, they left me with my mother's sister in North Carolina. To the sound of tree frogs in the hot and humid evening, my mother tucked me in and kissed me good night, and the next morning she was gone. Gone! She and my father had decided that they could not afford to be proper parents and work to earn enough to support us decently. So one morning, with honeybees and crickets now buzzing outside the window of a house with no plumbing or electricity, I awoke to find no mother. My aunt scrubbed me in a big tin washtub. I was utterly bewildered. Why would my mother leave me without even telling me why? Was I too young to understand without flying into a tantrum that would tear at
her heart so it would have made it impossible for her to leave me? She and my father knew what they had to do to get ahead. But that one year, without the security of my own parents, has stayed with me all these years. I hated living in my aunt's house. I missed the doting of my parents, and I was terrified of the outhouse, where I had seen snakes, spiders, and lizards. And I was so bewildered. Nobody would answer my questions, “Where is my mother? Why did she leave me here?”

How could I possibly understand that the decision to leave me with this aunt was inspired by a need to secure a better future for me? My father had crunched the numbers. Though he had little book learning, he always had a very astute business mind. He knew if he and my mother could be free for one year of the demands of parenthood, they could get ahead financially. So they chose a hard path for a year to build us a better life. In their year of working without me around, they were able to move to a larger apartment, in which they occupied two rooms and rented out the others.

I returned to it one day with them from the South, and said very little. A few years later, their work ethic would become my own work ethic, but at the time, their decision only caused me misery. We never talked about that lost year—my parents simply didn't discuss difficult and disturbing incidents. But I was scarred by it, and I was left with such a deep feeling of abandonment that I took it with me for years, all the way into middle age and beyond. And I still believe that that year—and the fear I subsequently had of being left behind—caused me to stick with men who were absolutely wrong for me later in my life. I also carried with me a feeling that I had done something
wrong to deserve such treatment from people I loved so very much.

But that day when my parents finally brought me back to New York, I will say this: a far more comfortable life was beginning for all of us in every way.

My parents were all about moving up. But stylish as Harlem was in those years, it was still a ghetto. So early on, my father talked of moving to the suburbs—and Mother urged him along with the idea. He once interrupted a game of stickball outside our home to have the children who were playing take their coats off his car—he prided himself on having a clean car—and when he returned he found his windshield broken. It only reinforced his dream of having a nice lawn on which his little girl could play without worry, and a garage to keep his Chrysler safe from stickball players. It took a long time to move. But he was doing well. By the time I was in kindergarten, he had saved enough to purchase a brownstone as a rental property. So he became a landlord.

If you tried to tell me we lived in a rough part of town or that we were low on the social totem pole, I would not have believed you. To me, my parents were a king and queen, and I was their princess, a Harlem princess. Though my father rarely said very much, they adored me and surrounded me with everything, from toys and clothes to hugs at night, that made me feel loved and secure, and on a pedestal all my own.

I took my role in my elementary school production of
Pinocchio
very seriously, and so did my mother. “All right, let's study your lines now,” she'd tell me. We'd rehearse together. “Did you like that, Mommy?” I'd say, working until my bed
time. I was relentless in my determination to have every little line and every little action perfected, and she was with me every step of the way, as much a coach as an accomplice. “Should I say it like this or that? Faster or slower? High or low?” For weeks, I couldn't talk about anything but that elementary school play. My mother never tired of it.