The Legs Are the Last to Go (28 page)

The only thing that was difficult was my sister. Lydia, who is fourteen years younger than me, has been unwell for years. It's not something I want to write about, but I think I've learned a few things about her situation that are worth sharing.

When my mother was alive, she refused to take her younger daughter's problems all that seriously because she was afraid, unsure of what to do. And for years, my father had a hard time facing facts about her, too.

It took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that there was little I could do to fix her. I should have seen the signs a lot earlier—she needed professional help. Fifty years ago, my mother used to be amazed because she would run off down the sidewalk without looking back with the normal fear of a little child. She was lively and mischievous, and my friends and I adored her. We were young teens who loved the idea of dressing up a pretty little baby and taking her out for a stroll. Just the sight of her tiny face waiting for me in the window of our
brownstone in Harlem filled me with happiness when I'd come home from school. Often she would be singing as I walked through the door.

As a child, Lydia always had the capacity to make us all very happy. But as an adult, she became too much for any of us to understand, with incidents of behavior far beyond the understanding of anyone except professionals. Finally, after years of struggle to help her normalize her life, one of her doctors explained to me, “You have no power over any of this, and I've watched this kind of situation take over the lives of families over and over again.”

“Yes, I know,” I said. “She really has affected all our lives.”

“Well, my suggestion is you make a deal with her,” he continued. “Tell her that you will stand behind her one hundred percent if she will agree to get treatment. If she won't agree to that, she will never have a life and neither will you.”

It was common sense, but until that moment I had never thought of it.

I told Lydia what this doctor said. She said she didn't need help. Days later, there was another terrible incident that upset our entire family. And it was around that time that I made a big decision. I looked at myself in the mirror, and I said, “You can't do this anymore, Diahann.” So I called Lydia and told her, “I don't want to talk to you anymore unless it's about getting treatment. If you do that, I will pay for it, and continue to be around for you, and I will be there to help you start a new life the day of your release. If not, I'm finished, Lydia, we're through.”

She didn't believe me. And frankly, I didn't believe myself, either.

But I have stuck to my word. Now we speak only a few times a year. But there isn't a day I don't hope to get a call saying that she has agreed to get help. As soon as that happens, I will get behind her 100 percent. Meanwhile, I lament the loss of our relationship. And I pray she will get well someday. But I don't drive myself wild with worry anymore. I have finally figured out that there are some things in life you can't control, and that there are some people you can't help until they are ready to be helped. Maybe I haven't done all I can. Maybe I have. But I now accept that my sister's problems may never be resolved. And as unsatisfying as it is, that's a resolution of sorts.

A few years ago, I drove past the old family brownstone in Harlem, and saw the front window in our parlor, and remembered little Lydia's face there, clear as sunlight.

My father had invited me to join him back at his beloved Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. He was being honored for his years of service as a deacon. You can imagine how much pleasure it gave him to be back there with me. When I got there, I remembered walking up the stairs as a young girl in my little organza dresses and with bows in my hair. I remembered sitting in the beautiful pews under balconies flooded with light. I remembered being among such hopeful people, the hats, the gloves, my father so handsome in his black suit and tie. I remembered the inspirational sermons, the invigorating oratory, and, of course, singing in the choir. Most of all I remembered holding the hands of my parents. And I think I cried.

I always felt at home in that beautiful church, and I always felt so safe. This hardworking father of mine always made sure I was safe. He wanted to protect me so much that he once literally
lifted a flirting stranger into the air and carried him down the block just to keep him away from me. (I was nine months pregnant at the time.) My father worried about every friend and boyfriend I had, every schooling and career decision I ever made. Maybe his choices weren't the most sophisticated. But his behavior always came from love. He worked to build an incredible life for me.

And now here I was with him at his old church to see him honored. I was delighted to meet the Reverend Calvin Butts, the pastor and a brilliant political figure in the community. I was thrilled to meet the children of children I remembered from sixty years ago. The level of discourse and community ideals in the sermon made me proud to be among this congregation. Later, my father introduced me to everyone and I cheerfully shook hands with great pride. He was ecstatic to see me enjoying our visit. And I was happy that he wanted to share this part of his life.

He was proud of me and I was proud of him.

He was financially independent. He'd really thought through his retirement years, and made some very good decisions about moving to a rest home and living near his family. I missed not having him closer, but he was loved and well cared for on his native East Coast, among friends and a church community he loved. And his sister, Eleanor, was just wonderful to him. I had been estranged from her for years, I don't even know why, frankly. But I made a point of telling her how grateful I was that she'd encouraged him to share her family. I told her what a comfort it was to know his sister was watching over him so lovingly.

Not long ago, a time came when I knew I had to see him. He was ninety-six and the cancer was finally taking its toll. The happy look on his face when I walked into his room was enough to stop my heart. “Would you look who's here,” he said. “It's my daughter all the way from California!” He was weak, certainly, and he needed help feeding himself. But even when his sister and I and others were meeting with hospice workers about his end-of-life care, he was present, and alert. He remembered dates and business details from years ago, when asked for them. And I could tell he was at peace with where he was in his life, satisfied with what he had accomplished. There was only the faintest look of confusion on his face that I observed as my visit went on in those last days, as if he wanted to know what was wrong with him and what was going on exactly. He could get a little foggy from the medication in the pain patch he was wearing for the cancer, and a little anxious, even as the nurses fussed over him with what seemed to be genuine affection.

He really had seduced each and every one of them. And I just had to laugh. “Oh, Dad,” I thought to myself as they hovered over him, “you really are incorrigible!”

The last time I saw my father he was being lifted in his wheelchair into a van. He was wearing a silly little cap that someone had bought him for the rough New Jersey winter weather, and there was a wistful look on his face as we said good-bye.

“So long, Dad,” I said. “I'll see you soon.”

He thanked me for coming. But he didn't say he'd see me soon.

I think he knew it was our last good-bye.

His funeral came just a couple weeks later, and I flew back to New Jersey to a service that his sister and I, other members of the family, and his church had helped to arrange. It took place in a part of the state that was lovely and as rural as my father's childhood landscape in South Carolina. The minister of the church, Father Saunders, presented me with a letter for the family from the Reverend Calvin Butts, and a resolution from his esteemed Abyssinian Baptist Church. It said:
Deacon Johnson was a mild-mannered, soft-spoken, well-dressed gentleman at all times. You could always depend on him to complete an assignment. He had a keen insight in the correct solutions of many common problems that we encounter every day. He seldom volunteered his thinking or problem solving. However, if asked, he would invariably come up with the best solution.

That was my dad, a role model of clear thinking and restraint.

When the casket was brought in, it was covered with a simple cloth. I was sitting in the second row and I kept thinking, “My father is in that box.” There in that box was the man who, when I was a child, had been so tall and strong that he could lift me up as if I were as light as a feather. There was the man who looked so dashing in my youth, when he'd be behind the wheels of his brand-new Chryslers. He was a man everyone thought of as austere. But I was always able to break through his stern demeanor and find a man full of warmth and love, imperfect as a father, perhaps, but still wonderful in the enormity of his caring.

The memorial service would have greatly pleased him. It had a simple elegance and dignity. I know my father would have
appreciated the decorum. I gave a short speech thanking everyone for attending, especially the deacons from the Abyssinian Baptist Church, and how wonderful it was to know he'd been loved by so many people in the communities where he'd chosen to live. I didn't say it, but I was very happy to see that this church—the community of which he had become a part of in the last years of his life—was also an integrated one. It was another stretch, I thought, a leap of faith, really, for the racially untrusting young man from Aiken, South Carolina. He had lived the life he had chosen for himself, and cherished his multiracial grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He had lived to experience this monumental shift in the world, which included the first time a black man ran for president of the United States.

The ride away from the funeral with my relatives was not solemn. We spoke of him warmly, happy he had had such a good, long, and, for the most part, healthy life.

He had been a wonderful influence on me—except I have to admit that when I was flying home from the funeral with my oldest family friend, Sylvia, I did something I never do: I asked for a double portion of my meal, plus a glass of red wine, which I never do, because the wine on airlines is quite undrinkable. I realized that I was toasting my father, who only drank twice a year, either a glass of Mogen David or Manischewitz. Sylvia thought it was because I was trying to fill a void that had just opened in my life—suddenly I had no parents. It's a strange feeling no matter when it happens to you in your life, and one that throws you for a while. But I wonder if my overeating wasn't just a little bit of a momentary rebellion, too. My father,
after all, always ate so carefully. With him gone, and just hours after his funeral, I could finally make a complete and total glutton of myself.

When I arrived home, I was so bemused. I thought, “Dad, don't worry, that will never happen again,” and I ate nothing the next day to make it up to him and to myself. And just a few days after his passing, I started using his juicer.

What a lucky woman I was to have had such good parents for so long.

And I'm so glad my father and I had a chance to reconcile, and have a proper and quiet good-bye just days before his passing. The peace we found with each other before it was too late is something that has brought great comfort to me. When you're forgiven, it makes you understand just how much you are loved. And when you forgive? The whole world opens up to you and you make yourself available to the highest form of happiness.

Academy of Television Arts & Sciences 15th Annual Hall of Fame Ceremony. Inductee Bob Mackie and Diahann Carroll. (Photograph by M. Caulfield/WireImage)

IT WAS A FRIDAY NIGHT IN APRIL OF 2006, IN NEW
York City, at Feinstein's at the Regency, and I was about to go on with my brand-new one-woman show. I was standing in an area far too tiny to be called backstage. It was a nook, really, a holding area that was barely large enough to contain me and my outsize worries. Through the pounding of my anxious heart, I heard a full house out there, and they sounded happy. I was not used to the sound of such an intimate full house; it's very different from the sound of hundreds in a cavernous Vegas room. Feinstein's cabaret space, which is perhaps the most prestigious in the whole country, only seats around a hundred people. They would be so close, I thought, that they'd be able to see every line on my face and hear every quirk and quaver in my delivery. Everything about me was completely accustomed to having distance—a lot of room for grand illusions and make-believe. You can't do that with an audience sitting under you, looking at your shoes. I still remember during the earliest days
of my career, which was the last time I sang in a tiny space, a man actually told me that I was wearing cheap shoes. Maybe that was what started me on the road to bigger and bigger shows.

Now here I was, back to a level of intimacy that would allow me to actually see reactions on the faces in my audience. But I didn't want to see the face of the
New York Times
critic likely to skewer me.

The venue wasn't the only thing that was intimate. The material was, too. That was new to a lady who always felt that performers who talked too much about themselves were inappropriate bordering on vulgar. The most intimidating part of all for me was the size of the orchestra—not even an orchestra, a combo really, a septet. I had never performed with fewer than fourteen musicians. My delivery had always been about the big voice and big sound that came with big brass and string sections. How did I get myself into this?

I wasn't about small. I was always about big.

Remember, I grew up on MGM musicals that were as much about spectacle as melody. I learned the ropes on the stages of Catskills resorts, where everything from your dress to your gestures had to be as big as your voice. The clubs I played in New York had room for good-size orchestras. And from there, things got even bigger in Miami, Chicago, Tahoe, Reno, and Vegas. And let me tell you something, when you get used to having a twenty-five-piece orchestra and the range of power that all those musicians can muster without so much as a synthesizer or electric guitar, you feel that that's the sound you have to have when you perform—big, fluid, and elegant. You get used to it fast.

I mean, once you've sung a Kurt Weill medley with dozens of strings backing you up, it becomes impossible to imagine it any other way. My whole career became one in which I traveled “fully contained,” as the term went, with musicians and staff. The gowns I wore and the numbers I picked were chosen as a way to dazzle audiences. From my earliest days, my shows seduced with their size, whether in Havana, where I performed in the late fifties for a society still holding on to its taste for the lavish, or in Paris, where I once performed at the Olympia, which is the Parisian Radio City Music Hall. I will never forget the night the orchestra got lost at that performance. The whole illusion of seamless spectacle was falling apart in front of an impeccably dressed French audience so enthralled with the glamour of an American Negro star. So I did something I had never done before. I stopped the orchestra and sang the rest of the song a capella. It was a very strange feeling, to be singing alone into the glaring lights of that enormous theater. And I thought it would be a total disaster. But the next day, I opened the papers to find that the critics loved it. Perhaps my voice and presence were enough to carry off a simpler kind of act. I paid no attention.

For years, my excessive level of production seemed anything but absurd to me. It's what audiences wanted in those big rooms, not just in Vegas, but all over the country. There was no questioning the cost. The size of the audiences would pay for it all.

And oh, did I love working with some of the most talented musicians and musical directors of their time. There is a melding that happens when you sing with a big orchestra, and you
tend to become an instrument with them to create great sound-scapes in beautifully lit rooms with the perfect acoustics to belt and sashay and shimmer.

And television? It may be an intimate medium. But from the very beginning, its aim was to overwhelm. I would show up to be a guest star on
Carol Burnett
at this studio or that one around Hollywood through the 1960s and 1970s, and I'd find entire cities moving around. There were spectacular sets just to back up a song like “I Got Plenty of Nothing” or “The Best Things in Life Are Free.” There would be armies of people employed, too. I was much too busy learning my steps and figuring out my wardrobe changes to think about it. And I have to say that I never took any of the glamour of it for granted. I'd find myself thinking, “Here I am on this show or this stage, me, this little girl from Harlem, and all these people are here working so I can sing.”

Of course there were times when even I had to question the level of spectacle. When I had my summer variety series in the mid-1970s, we did a number, “I'll Go My Way by Myself.” It was all about facing the world on my own. “No one knows better than I, myself, I'm by myself,” I sang. And as I did, the clever director had all these people coming and going around me on the set, one to brush out and spray my hair, another to do my makeup, another to light me, another with a script to go over lines, until my little meditative song of solitude had turned into the three-ring circus I knew so well. That's what it was almost always like whenever I'd open my little mouth to sing. Big.

I still remember being in a number on
The Ed Sullivan Show
in his theater in New York. The song I was singing was
“Hum Drum Blues” by Oscar Brown. It was a gritty song about what it's like to be unable to escape the cycle of poverty, a political song for the moment, really, that reflected both the restlessness of the black community and the national fight for equality. We were rehearsing it, with its driving, urgent beat and urgent lyrics, and meanwhile there were all these dancers around me sashaying around with pink and yellow umbrellas. So I finally said, “Hold it, just a moment, please. Why are all these dancers around me with pink and yellow umbrellas?”

At the time, the show was being produced by Ed Sullivan's son-in-law. So he came out and asked, “What's the matter, Diahann?” I told him that the lyrics I had been singing were “Stuck in a rut going nowhere,” and the name of the song was “Hum Drum Blues.” I said that the song was about poverty and the ghetto and that twirling colorful umbrellas really made no sense. Now, I was still young at that time, and most assuredly I was not invited to have an opinion about such a gargantuan production number on such a gargantuan TV show. So my little question caused a big fuss. First the choreographer came out (I think it was Peter Gennaro) to deal with my question. Then my manager, Roy, and then half a dozen people were on that stage, all very agitated. Finally Ed Sullivan himself came onstage. He asked me what the trouble was.

“I'm singing about something I think is politically important,” I told him. “And I don't understand all the pink and yellow umbrellas. I just don't get it.”

And then Ed Sullivan, bless him, looked at the director and choreographer and the rest of this squad of creative individuals, all invested in creating the biggest spectacle they could,
and he asked, “So what
do
the pink and yellow umbrellas represent?”

Nobody had a good answer. So they toned it down. It was one of the first times in my career that I understood that bigger was not necessarily better.

Bigger could actually be nothing.

Another time I had to question spectacle was when I starred in a television special with Maurice Chevalier. Ours was the first collaboration between French and American television, and we were to sing songs about Broadway and Paris, a real hands-across-the-water effort. I looked au courant in my tasteful, slightly mod outfits and bobbed hair, and Maurice Chevalier—well, who wouldn't adore the old man as he crooned?

The only trouble was the director.

He was some kind of avant-garde sensation and his goal was to create an Op-Art spectacle with his two stars and chorus. That's how we ended up with Monsieur Chevalier singing “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” while, for reasons I will never understand, dancers in leotards moved around him holding up giant lips and mustaches. I don't remember anything I sang other than “I Love Paris.” But I do remember trying to get through a song set against a set that was a maze of mirrors, and having to stop at the end of every phrase. You can't deliver any meaning to an audience if you can't sing a song through to the end. This was supposed to be art. Instead, it was boring, pretentious, and big in every way except emotionally. At the end of each day of shooting, France's most charming crooner and America's darling new singing sensation left feeling uninspired.

“Have a good evening, Monsieur Chevalier,” I said.

“And the same to you,” he'd reply.

Was I making the same mistake a few years later, with my act and its set—a towering construction made of Lucite? It looked dazzling on the Las Vegas stage on which I sang a song by a popular folksinger of the moment, Don McLean. The song was “Starry, Starry Night.” It was about Vincent van Gogh. So why not project his famous stars all over the set at ten times the size they actually were in the painting? Never mind that the song was a delicate wisp of a ballad about suicide and sadness. We had rear-projection lighting that, in tandem with my orchestra, gown, and, oh yes, my lovely voice, would thrill even the most bored audience.

I had to do whatever I could to make an impact. By the 1970s, things had changed so much in my business that I was running in circles to keep up. Not only did I have to understand what Motown was about, I had to incorporate what Dionne Warwick was doing with Burt Bacharach's songs. I'd buy albums and cassettes in stores (and, soon enough, CDs) and listen to hundreds of songs on my living-room floor, in search of the new material that would help get me up-to-date. I found it exhausting. I also found the idea of replacing strings with synthesizers (not just for economic reasons, but to have a more contemporary sound) loathsome. Still, I kept my big act going, like the Big Top, with my full squad of staff and musicians at my side. I could not give up big.

Monte had told me years before that I should not be afraid of singing alone with a pianist, that I had the right voice and interpretive skills to pull off subtle and intimate. I didn't listen. I didn't have to. Eventually, though, things really started to dry
up. The audiences in Vegas had changed. I remember doing one show in the early 1980s in Reno, in which I had to share the stage with an elephant.

She was really the star, not me. Talk about the elephant in the room.

I was being told to downsize everything—my act and my life—and I was ignoring it. Well, I managed to downsize my life sooner than my act. I got rid of the huge house, waterfall and billiards room included, and moved to a smaller house. Then, ten years later, when I started wondering who all these people were who were working at my smaller house—gardeners, housekeepers, cooks, and more—I decided to stop trying to pretend I was a billionaire and move to a condo. I even organized a sale to sell everything, and jumped in my car just as the first buyers were driving up. They bought things I never really needed in the first place. I couldn't get over it. I was gleeful at the idea of sending all my stuff out into the world.

It didn't take long to understand that living in a condo and driving a sedan rather than a Rolls was liberating. Yes, some privacy is compromised in a high-rise. But maybe all that privacy, all that exclusivity, is just a little overrated. It's nice to be greeted by neighbors in the lobby on a daily basis. It's nice to have a home and a staff that doesn't make you feel like you're hemorrhaging every hard-earned penny. I was downsizing and I was growing up! I didn't need all the accoutrements to show myself that I had a luxurious life.

Still, when Michael Feinstein first invited me to perform in his small cabaret space, I turned him down cold. “I wouldn't know what to do, Michael,” I said.

“What do you mean, Diahann?” he asked.

“What am I going to do without my orchestra?”

“How many do you work with?”

“Twelve is usually the minimum.”

“Four would work better in such a small space.”

“That's why you don't want me, Michael. I can't be at my best if I can't take all my stuff with me.”

“Well, won't you think about it?”

I've always liked Michael. He isn't just a wonderful pianist, singer, and impresario. He's a wonderful man. I trust him. Several months later, an offer came in from him through my manager. Would I please do a show at his space at the Regency? That's when I seriously started to think about what it would be like to put an act together for a small room. There have been some wonderful one-woman shows in recent years and I thought perhaps I could find my way to creating my own. So I finally found myself warming to the idea and saying to my agent, “Well, let's try. Let's see what we can do.”

First, we made calls to see who was still around to work with. I needed a director, for starters. And when I was able to reach Larry Grossman after many calls, I said to him, “Thank God you're alive!” We found Lee Norris, my old musical director of twenty years, too…hallelujah. And little by little we got this minuscule group together and started working.

And that's how I began the process of walking myself into the twenty-first century.

This showbiz dinosaur was going to evolve!

I was not expecting much when Lee, my musical director, suggested I come to New York to hear the band he'd pulled
together. After all, it was only seven pieces. With my history of fronting orchestras of ninety musicians, and my regular routine of performing with a twenty-eight-piece group, fourteen at the smallest, what would this minuscule septet have to offer? Everything, it turned out. I could not believe how good the group sounded. They were top-level East Coast musicians, raised on Broadway and working around the greats, and what they sounded like was so inspiring I felt I needed a well-written show to rise to the occasion. Choosing songs was familiar. I've done that all my life. But what the hell was I going to
say
to this audience looking right up my nose?