The Legs Are the Last to Go (13 page)

In 1972, while David and I were still supposedly a couple, I was working in Vegas when I met a man named Freddie Glusman. He owned women's shops at some local hotels, and was the polar opposite of David in every way. He had a raspy voice, and a jagged face that looked dangerous. He loved diamond wristwatches, gold rings, gold chains around his neck.

We had met in my dressing room after a show. The next day, large bouquets arrived. There were also boxes of clothes from his shops.

Despite myself, there was an animal attraction I felt to this very demonstrative man.

We had lunch, we had dinner. I was vulnerable and he was one of those men who knows how to take care of a busy woman in show business. He was always there for me. And while I knew life with David would be a constant challenge to improve myself, it was all so easy with Freddie. The only thing I needed to do for him was show up and look pretty. I knew that with Freddie, I'd call all the shots, and it was awfully nice to be the one in control. Freddie was no fool. He knew I thought he was garish. (I'm not sure what you'd call the gown I was wearing with my over-the-top Vegas spectacles at the time, but never mind.)

“Do you have to wear forty-two gold chains around your neck,” I would ask him. “Please, at least button your shirt so we can get through dinner without making the table look like a hot tub.” And, “Must you wear shirts that belong on a rumba band?”

“I know they don't dress this way in New York,” he'd say. “But does everybody you're with have to walk around in Brooks Brothers blazers?”

It went on like that for quite a while.

“You're not going to wear those green alligator shoes to dinner, are you?”

“They match my green Piaget watch!”

Why the hell didn't I just get the hell out of there? Freddy
had a big heart and he loved and adored my daughter and my mother, which touched me deeply. That had a great deal to do with why I remained.

That summer, I had returned to my apartment in New York after shooting a television special with Charles Aznavour, Twiggy, Louis Jourdan, and Perry Como. David and I had a fight at the Plaza over dinner. He had been toasting my success, saying “Here's to your show,” and “Here's to us,” and carrying on and on in his typically effusive way. I was seriously confused about what was going on with Freddie, and I really wanted to talk. So when he raised his glass for yet another toast, I smashed my glass into his. I was as stunned as he was. We decided to let our relationship cool. Meanwhile, I was keeping things going with Freddie. I felt like a hard-core two-timer.

One night David called and said he wanted to talk. At dinner at the Regency, he was not his usual buoyant self. “Darling, I have something to say to you,” he told me in a highly theatrical manner. “I know there are differences between us, but I don't want to discuss them—they're not all that substantial. I also don't want to pressure you. But in my jacket I have two boxes. One contains a brooch. The other, a ring that you once admired in Asprey's in London. If you accept the brooch, we will continue our friendship. If you accept the ring, which I hope you will, then we will be engaged. Which will it be?” He put them on the table. He looked flushed in the dim light. And I was too stunned to answer. During the course of the evening, I told him I would love to accept his ring, but I needed his understanding and patience as I thought hard about the prospect of marriage.

I knew that with his travel schedule I'd end up at his side all the time rather than face being alone. So sooner or later, there would have to be major compromises in my life, and I was worried I'd resent him for it. He also wanted children. I had a daughter, and was already uncomfortable about not being with her enough because of my career, and I really didn't want the responsibility of another child. On the other hand, I loved David and I wanted to make him happy. We really were well suited to each other.

So we became engaged, and one day we came down to the lobby of the Plaza hotel, where we had a small apartment, and found hundreds of paparazzi and television networks snapping pictures of us and wishing us congratulations.

We had a lavish engagement party. We had a great time. But soon enough, he had to jet off to London or Australia or somewhere a lot farther than Vegas. I stayed in our apartment at the Plaza. I used to love living there, when I was earning my keep performing at the Persian Room. This was different. I was now simply the lady with David Frost.

We'd have good times when he returned, especially over holidays at my California home in Benedict Canyon. He was wonderful, swimming and playing pool with Suzanne, so much fun.

But each time he'd have to go away, I became more and more resentful.

Finally I phoned him and said I wanted to call it off for good.

He was shocked, but there was nothing he could do.

As had been the case with Monte Kay, I couldn't make it
work with a man who was secure with himself and only wanted what was best for me. A week or two later, I was back working in Vegas, and Freddie was right at my side, taking care of me while we went to dinner or relaxed on the boat he kept on Lake Mead. “You two look pretty comfortable together,” one of his friends said.

“Well, I'm in love,” Freddie said.

“So why don't you stop playing around and get married,” the friend asked.

“Because she won't marry me.”

Then I heard these words come out of my mouth: “I'm not so sure about that.”

“So, do you want to marry me?” he asked.

“I guess so. Why not,” I replied.

He gave me the biggest diamond ring I'd ever seen, and I told myself he'd take care of me forever and I'd never have to worry about being alone again. David called to be sure it was for real, and when I told him it was, he wished me every happiness.

In February 1973, I was whisked off to a wedding dinner to become a wife again. I was marrying Freddie without a word to thirteen-year-old Suzanne, who was attending the Athenian School in the San Francisco Bay Area. For that level of thoughtlessness, I have no explanation. I called my mother, who told Suzanne the news.

I moved through the next few months with hardly a thought in my head. And at first, I didn't take it seriously when Freddie became jealous of some of the men with whom I worked. Then his accusations grew more heated, especially about my
working relationship with my record producer. One night in Lake Tahoe, I arrived back in our hotel room after a long and difficult day. Freddie was feeling amorous. I explained I was tired. That's when he started cursing at me and hitting me. I had heard he could be this way, but I had never seen it before. But suddenly the nice, fun guy had turned into a raging bully I didn't know at all. I locked the door behind me in the bathroom. Freddie tried to break it down. Security came in and asked him to leave the hotel.

He filed papers for divorce the next day in Reno. Then he called me to try to reconcile. I told him the marriage had never made any sense in the first place.

I never saw him again, and things were over with David, too.

I had hurt both men very badly. And I'd hurt myself.

To make matters worse, my career wasn't going anywhere. When
Julia
ended, I was not inundated with scripts. The show had run its course after three great years, and ratings were down enough that it was a good time to sign off. But to do what? I had to stick to what I did best, and there were television specials.

Then, in 1974, a role came along in an independent movie called
Claudine
. I played a welfare mother in Harlem opposite James Earl Jones as a sanitation man. It was a totally liberating and gratifying experience. I loved the character who inhabited the gritty world Julia had assiduously avoided. My performance earned me a 1975 Oscar nomination. One of the journalists who came to interview me at the time was a managing editor
of
Jet
magazine named Robert DeLeon. He was a brilliant young man who at the age of fifteen had attended Moorhouse College on a full scholarship. I later learned he also had a daughter.

I met Robert again in Chicago, where I was performing at the Palmer House. He approached me after a press conference to ask if I would agree to have him cover my activities the day of the Academy Awards for his publication. When the day came, he presented me with a bracelet. It was an awkward, presumptuous gesture for a journalist covering a story. And when it was time to leave Los Angeles (I was disappointed after not winning the Oscar) to return to my singing engagement in Chicago, Robert had booked himself onto my flight in the seat next to mine. Who was this impetuous and very young man anyway, and what did he think he was doing?

On the plane, he made it a point to mention, during our effortless conversation, that he had separated from his wife. In Chicago the next night, he asked me to dinner. The evening started off badly. He was very rude to the maître d' when we had to wait for our table. Then he verbally abused a waiter. I told him he'd better calm down, and when he did, it became clear to me that he really was an exceptional young man. He was very ambitious, and a Fulbright scholar, which I particularly responded to because I still had issues around not graduating from college. He had a great position at Johnson Publications and a great future. We spent a couple of weeks seeing each other, and when he invited me to join him at a friend's house in St. Thomas, I thought it sounded fun. When I heard him tell his boss on the phone from the house in St. Thomas, “Guess
who I'm with?” I became suspicious, realized I was being used, and that Robert was not the way he had presented himself. I didn't want to believe that, however. When he opened his suitcase and I saw he had packed almost nothing, and I volunteered to lend him some money to buy some clothes, I didn't think twice about that, either. I should have.

Once again, I found myself accepting everything and anything from a man who showed interest. Well, we had fun together. It didn't matter to me at the time that he was twenty-four and I was forty. In fact, older women and younger men were a bit of a feminist trend at the moment. But strangely, it was the camaraderie I enjoyed with him. Robert could talk about anything, and talk he did, first and foremost about marriage. And even though I'd been in therapy long enough to know it was okay for me to take charge around men, I let him arrange the wedding at Columbia University. It included exclusive coverage in
Jet,
unbeknownst to me. It wasn't until I saw our pictures on the cover months later that I found out about it.

Not long after that, Robert left his job at the magazine in Chicago and became a management consultant in Oakland. And what did I do? I left show business to follow right behind him and become a full-time housewife.

It was career suicide, but I enjoyed being a wife, at least for a while.

The trouble began with money. Robert had a modest income but expensive taste. And I found myself paying for everything—the luxurious home in Oakland (I sold my mansion in Beverly Hills to be in Oakland!), the Ferrari, the gorgeous clothes.

“You have to live in a certain style,” he said.

My credit cards were flying and I just let it happen.

Then the drinking started. One night he was arrested for drunk driving, and I had to answer questions at an Oakland police station to keep an item out of the newspapers. Nine months after moving to Oakland for his new job, Robert quit. He wanted to get into public relations in Los Angeles. I said it was fine with me, but nothing more. “You know I don't have enough money to put an office together,” he barked. “Why are you making me come to you and ask you for help?” So I told him I would back him until he was on his feet. He was foolishly optimistic, thinking he could just pick up the phone and have celebrities leave their press agents to be the clients of someone young and untested. “I'm really sorry, Robert, I can't do that,” Sammy Davis had to tell him. “And for what it's worth, I think you ought to do everything you can to form this business on your own. Don't become Mr. Diahann Carroll.” It couldn't be avoided. When Quincy Jones also turned him down, Robert resorted to his last hope—me—and pressured me to become his client. He'd be a press office with a client list of one.

“For the sake of your dignity, the people in this town have to know you're your own man,” I told him. “I won't have anything to do with this.”

Eventually, I suggested I live in New York for a period while he continued living in Los Angeles. As the time came for the temporary separation, Robert grew despondent. He'd been drinking for days when he said to me, “You're always going to be all right, aren't you?” I asked him what he meant. “I mean,”
he said, “you're always going to land on your feet, aren't you?” I told him I hoped so and asked if that was a problem. “No,” he said. “I just didn't know that about you. You will never fail.”

I went off to a rehearsal and he did not get home that night at all.

It turned out that Robert had been speeding on Mulhol-land Drive and lost control of the car. High above Los Angeles on a winding road, he had tumbled to his death.

I was stunned. And I didn't know what to think, except that perhaps for the first time in a long time, Robert, who had been so young and tormented, was finally at peace.

I put on black and isolated myself from the world. Vodka and wine helped. I couldn't seem to get a grip for months. Friends could not rouse me. Robert's things were everywhere. His date book was on his desk, opened. His toothbrush and razors were in the bathroom. Everything in my house reminded me of the tortured young man who had been my third husband.

It was my mother who finally got through to me. “There's nothing you can do for Robert anymore,” she told me. “You're still a young woman with a lifetime ahead of you. This isn't doing anyone any good, Diahann.” And just like when I was a girl, I listened to her. She was right. I slowly did get back on my feet, just the way Robert said I always would. The Huntington Hartford Theater had called my agent. Carol Burnett and Dick Van Dyke were stepping out of a production of
Same Time Next Year
and I was wanted by producers to step into the show to play op
posite Cleavon Little. I put everything I had into that role, my fullest concentration, and it ended up saving my life.