The Legs Are the Last to Go (12 page)

 

The years went by, male companions came and went. Alan Marshall was a handsome black actor, but no star. I'm sure the trappings of my life in my
Julia
years were part of my appeal to him. He moved into the mansion I had just bought while I was working on a singing tour between seasons of
Julia
. And he did so without my knowing it. This house in Beverly Hills had been owned by the son of Barbara Hutton, the famous Woolworth heiress. It was enormous, with its waterfall and swimming pool with a black bottom, unusual in those days. There was a large staff, a man in charge of cars, another in charge of the gardens, a nanny for my daughter, and a cook who didn't know how to cook. (I could only bring myself to
fire her when she served game hens with the giblets still wrapped in paper in lieu of stuffing.) I once overheard Alan tell someone it was the home that I had bought for him. I let it go, as I chose to ignore all the signs that he was troubled, because, well, every princess needs her prince, and when I looked at us in the mirror, I thought I'd found mine. Okay, he was a little jealous.

But jealousy is one thing, verbal abuse is another. Instead of putting a stop to the verbal abuse for good, I let it continue. Then I started putting up with the physical abuse he doled out on a regular basis. The prospect of being alone was too unbearable for me at the time—until Sidney and I parted, I had never lived without a partner in all of my adult life, and here I was in my thirties! So I didn't show him that I had the slightest amount of self-respect. (Analysis eventually helped me recognize that living alone was something I needed to try. I now realize I didn't accomplish this until the end of my fourth marriage. Some of us are slow learners.) When I was with Alan, it was such a guilt-ridden time (
capitalist pigs
had entered the vernacular) that I thought it was possible I deserved to be treated badly just for being so wealthy. I was a big to-do at a cultural moment when monetary success was suspect. And when you're a success, it only makes the critics more shrill.

The question that kept coming up at the time was, “What kind of single black mother was I supposed to be as Julia anyway?” Twentieth Century-Fox and NBC expected the kind that got top Nielsen ratings! And yet the pressure to be someone else never let up in my three years on the show. I was not
ignorant about the issues of civil rights in this country, or my place as a national celebrity who could voice opinions to help make changes. That's why I hosted fund-raisers for the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee with Harry Belafonte and Stokely Carmichael in my home. I supported the Black Panthers and Shirley Chisholm's bid to be the first black female president. In fact, her major Los Angeles fund-raiser was in my home. But deep down, I never saw
Julia
as a documentary, and I didn't see why, to be worthwhile, it had to be about a black woman wearing an Afro and dashiki and living in a ghetto. It was a sitcom. And it was a successful one. I knew why it was pulling in the ratings, too. It made the white majority feel comfortable with a black lead character who was not offensive to them in any way. And frankly, it was a role I was glad to portray.

Race, of course, is a major factor in my life, though it's never been my sole preoccupation. I grew up in schools with integrated classrooms. My mother constantly reminded me that I was not to be pushed into letting the color of my skin determine my entire life. I was trained by people who related to me based on my talent and ambition, not my race. I wasn't a sellout, as I had been accused of being by some, but rather someone looking to do what I perceived as quality work.

Still, people wanted to know what kind of black woman I was. Oh, that question! Well, let's see: I was the kind of black woman who, when asked to play drums with Harry Belafonte on one of his specials, could not. After a few days of rehearsing a calypso song with him, well-meaning Harry discovered that I just could not beat a drum hanging around my neck and
sing at the same time. And as much as he adored me, Harry had to accept that. What kind of black woman was I? The kind who went in front of advertisers and buyers at the “up-fronts” before the first season of
Julia
and told them: “Hello, I'm Diahann Carroll, and I was raised by a nice Jewish family in Beverly Hills!” That broke the ice and got a laugh from the crowd. There were just so many questions to answer from the press in those years, and even as I took them on, I was apprehensive.

I was under the political microscope for
Julia
like you wouldn't believe. But I didn't have the expertise to discuss the socioeconomic situation of the African-American community. Nor did I feel I should have to defend the character of a polite nurse with excellent taste in clothes, some of which I brought to the set from my own closet. I was simply trying to get comfortable playing a hardworking, financially strapped single mother who slept on a living-room sofa in a one-bedroom apartment.

The studio had its hands full with all the complaint letters, and had to hire two full-time assistants just to answer all of them. And many psychologists, politicians, and journalists all felt it was important to meet with me about the show's impact.

I also had my hands full with Hal Kanter, the show's creator. He and I constantly discussed the material he was crafting. I was already established when
Julia
took me into the homes of millions. And when I inhabited a character, I did so completely—which, on occasion, brought me into conflict with Hal. He once wrote a scene in which I got so upset I
tossed a baby into the air. As I confess in a later chapter, I'll never be given an award for mothering, but tossing a baby into the air is something I know a mother is not inclined to do. I told Hal so. He didn't want to change the script, and so he left the Fox lot. When I found out he was gone, I left the lot, too.

He called me in a rage. “What the hell are you doing?” he asked.

“What are you doing, Hal? Why did you leave the set?” A little give and a little take on both our parts and the scene worked out.

We had our issues, and despite the turmoil around America's first black sitcom, the show held up nicely. He really did write well. In the pilot episode, there's a scene in which Julia is on the phone with crotchety Dr. Chegley, the white doctor who's about to hire her, played by Lloyd Nolan.

“You should know I'm colored,” she tells him.

“Oh, and what color are you?” he asks.

“I'm a Negro,” Julia says.

“Have you always been a Negro or are you just trying to be fashionable?” he asks.

It was a great line, and an important one to air on national television at the time. But for every bit of good many felt the show was accomplishing, some felt the opposite.

Everything I said was making national news. Journalists tried to goad me into dismissing black nationalist groups and I absolutely refused. “Their purpose is to give dignity, education, and economic opportunity to young blacks, and that I support,” I said.

Race was a part of Julia's life, but it didn't rule the show. Motherhood did. But people kept insisting that Julia was living a lie, and only dating the nicest black men. What did people expect? It was
network
television! Please!

One letter writer asked, “Don't you realize you're letting the white community get away with murder by not insisting it address itself to the black male?”

Actually, I had enough on my hands with the black male I had in my own life at the time. Flawed as he was in so many ways, Alan kept leading the chorus of critics. He knew what buttons to push. And I allowed it, defending myself against his accusations as if they were rational. His violence against me continued. I finally came to my senses the day he yelled at me in front of Suzanne.

It was especially ironic because it was in my house that he did so.

I took Suzanne and walked out on him then and there. When I returned the next day, he knocked me to the floor and kicked me in the face, shouting, “I will ruin your face!”

It was the worst beating he ever gave me, and it was the last. We were through.

 

And now for something completely different—David Frost, the television talk-show host who ruled the culture in the 1960s and 1970s. He was one of the best things that ever happened to me. We met in 1970, not long after the end of Alan, and while
Julia
was going into its third season. I was on hiatus,
and singing in New York. He came backstage after my show, this suave, fair-skinned Englishman in a blue blazer and tie, and we ended up shooting pool with some friends. It was a lighthearted evening. Not long after that, he invited me to appear on his talk show. The hour flew. We had such a good time on the air that it felt like a first date. David put me totally at ease. We ended up being photographed out and about together in the weeks that followed, and it wasn't long before we realized we were getting quite serious.

The nights that followed were giddy, fizzy, and glossy. They were also very busy, as I was shooting
Julia
and David was hosting his talk shows in New York and London. But he always found a way to find me. “Darling, I have to fly into Los Angeles, tomorrow night—and we can have dinner, isn't that marvelous?” he'd say. And he'd be there, looking wonderful as we shared champagne. We were comfortable with each other. His family in England, whom he eventually took me to meet, was lovely and felt similar to mine—decent middle-class people with whom I could relate. In fact, I remember thinking his mother and mine were like black and white images of each other as they went off in their mink stoles together to the theater in New York. Like my mother, his mother had somehow created a famous son with a drive to charm millions.

And charm he did. My mother was crazy about him. Although she still didn't quite understand my ability to date men without concern for race.

“Don't you get confused when you wake up in the morning not knowing if the man next to you is going to be black or
white?” she once asked me. “Mother, I don't go to bed with a color, I go to bed with a man!” I told her.

He was so kind to me and solicitous of her that her questions melted away.

It seemed there was nobody who didn't adore David and want him around, including the Nixons when they were in the White House. (Let it be known that I refused to go!) But I went just about everywhere else with him, and it could be exhausting, keeping up with his jet-set lifestyle. As our romance went public, we received constant coverage. But unlike the days when
The Bell Telephone Hour
called my agent to announce they would not consider me because I was married to Monte Kay, a white man, neither David nor I suffered consequences for our interracial relationship. In fact, Westinghouse, the broadcasting company that syndicated his show, was enthusiastic about us.

David was terribly supportive of my career. He listened as I worried aloud about what to do after
Julia
. One night, after we saw a brutal beating scene in the film
Klute,
I told him about Alan and the beatings I had received from him. He listened carefully, and caressed me. “Darling,” he said, taking me in his arms as I cried, “there are certain things we must put behind us. That part of your life is over now, and you have to move on.” At the time, I simply could not be that cavalier. Today, I know he was right. Does one have to dwell on bad experiences in order to heal from them properly? Or is it enough to acknowledge them, let dealing with the trauma make you a stronger person, and then move on? By the 1970s, I was getting deeper and deeper into psychoanalysis. I was undergoing medically guided LSD therapy, which had a tendency to put me in vivid touch
with feelings and sense memories I didn't realize I had in my subconscious. One memory that stood out was of being a baby in the womb, listening to my mother and father argue about whether I should be aborted.

It was through this process that I remembered being left behind by my mother in South Carolina as a young girl. When I first realized that that event actually did happen to me, I felt the light come pouring in on my life as a woman. I also had abandonment issues from that lonely year in North Carolina during my childhood. I harangued my mother to death about it. And her only response was, “There was nothing else we could do at the time.”

I would not let her off the hook. I needed to hold someone responsible.

But David was simply not invested in the culture of self-inspection that was taking me and California by storm at that time. He was warm, sophisticated, intelligent, driven, but relatively uncomplicated—unless you tried to deal with his schedule. Then it became very difficult. “This summer would you prefer a house in the Hamptons or elsewhere?” he asked. “We've been invited to spend time on the
Christina
. We should go!” (The
Christina
is the yacht Aristotle Onassis had named after his daughter.) We'd hop flights between Los Angeles, London, and New York. Soon I found myself making too much of the difficulties of life with a very positive man in constant motion. It was an easy way to stoke my old insecurities. “You know you don't deserve this man,” a little voice in my head told me as David lavished me with love and attention. “He's too good to be true. If you open your heart to him, you'll have it broken.”

He was always thinking about us as a couple, and worrying about my daughter. But each time we were apart, my raging insecurities and abandonment issues took over. They became criticisms. If he asked me to leave Las Vegas (where I was rehearsing) for an evening in New York because he needed me to give him my opinion on a new comedy act he was breaking in, I told him he was being unreasonable, forgetting all the times he jumped to help me. I sabotaged our relationship, finding problems anywhere I could. If he had to go off to report about the conflicts in Ireland, I ended up thinking he was having an affair while he was there. It was as if I needed to be the betrayed martyr. There was one awful night when I became ill at a party and he didn't leave with me quickly enough. I yelled that he was more concerned with networking than with me. He hated scenes. Frankly, I do, too. But I had to keep finding fault. If he thought I should travel when I didn't feel like it, I judged him harshly for it. When he tried to show me a house he wanted to buy for us in the English countryside (because I had admired a similar one not long before), I told him I was too tired to deal with such a thing. He was actually trying to tell me he wanted us to live together more formally, as a real domestic couple. Instead, I just found fault. I was simply a royal pain in the ass!