The Legs Are the Last to Go (6 page)

I auditioned for Music and Art by playing piano and singing two songs. All my training as a Tiny Tot at church and with the Metropolitan Opera's scholarship program for children paid off. I got in and found, to my absolute joy, teachers talking to students as if they were adults and students engaged in work at intellectual levels I had never seen before in my life. The school was a hotbed of creativity, one of the two schools that inspired the movie
Fame
years later. But you needed to apply yourself as a thinker, not just a performer. To that end, the school seemed to know no limits. Eleanor Roosevelt even came to our auditorium for a three-hour forum. Eugene Ormandy, the conductor of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, came to perform. We watched him, a little man, tap with his baton and speak so quietly to our student musicians that it was a real lesson in the power of keeping your voice down. I was thrown into thinking about music theory and all kinds of things I'd never thought about before. What was American music and where did it come from and why? Where were Gershwin's origins? What about Duke Ellington? They took your brain at that school and really stretched it. Even your activities on weekends had to be accounted for. “Miss Johnson,” one teacher said, “what newspapers do your parents read at home?” When I told him which tabloids we had around the house, he
insisted I buy the Sunday
New York Times
instead, and that I report to him on articles I'd read. This was really the beginning of a new life of the mind for me. I had to read the
Atlantic Monthly,
too. At first it was difficult, with so much to understand. But eventually I started to see how reading the
Times
and serious journalists could give me a broad picture of a fascinating world, all told in an erudite manner. Reading, I suddenly realized, could be so much more enlightening than I'd ever known.

It didn't take long for me to feel I was outgrowing my parents, even my mother, who had gone to such trouble to instill her taste and her values in my young soul.

This uncomfortable feeling of becoming more worldly than your own parents isn't uncommon among daughters of any generation. But it is something that was hard to reconcile with my earlier life, and it would temper the deep bond I had with my mother in our years ahead.

But to their great credit, as I thrived in my first years at a great high school, John and Mabel Johnson continued to pursue a better life. They had property, tenants, and two sources of income. My father learned that it was wise to trade in his car every two years for a newer model. And while I was taking my work at the High School of Music and Art very seriously, in both performing and academics, my parents spent the mid-1940s realizing their dream of finally moving to the suburbs—to Yonkers, just north of the city. At first, my father had been looking for a house. But when realtors showed only inferior places down by the railroad tracks, he decided to build his own. He got a tip from a friend about a lot on Dunston Avenue
in a nonintegrated area. “Just look,” the friend warned. “Don't stop, don't talk to anybody.” Heaven forbid the white neighbors would think that a black man might want to move in his family. In some ways, it was the same scenario Lorraine Hansberry wrote about fifteen years later in
A Raisin in the Sun
. But Dad bought the lot, found a contractor, and started building. Shortly after, someone, perhaps the KKK, stepped in and building supplies stopped arriving at the site. Then the contractor disappeared. Now, these days we have contractors disappear on us for all kinds of reasons. This was very different, and it took fortitude to overcome. But eventually, the house was finished and my father moved us in—me, my mother, and my brand-new baby sister, Lydia. He kept shotguns in the closet, “just in case,” he'd say.

I didn't pay any attention. If I had not been so preoccupied with my music and learning lines for my high school's sophisticated productions, going to see MGM musicals whenever I could, and then reading about singers and actors in magazines, perhaps I would have heard my parents discussing how someone drove by early one morning and fired shots through our front window. I would have heard about how the local police came to investigate the incident, but—no surprise—found no leads and never followed up. I would have heard about how someone from the neighborhood piled kindling alongside our home and set it on fire. Fortunately, the facade of our house was brick, hard as our determination.

And just as luckily, most of the movies those days were of an escapist nature that kept my anxiety level low. I considered myself, from a young age, a movie connoisseur. Though I was
upset that, except for the occasional character actor, these films were devoid of anyone but white actors, I saw almost everything. I took it all in. I saw Vivien Leigh in
Gone With the Wind,
and like many black girls of my era, I wanted to be Scarlett O'Hara. And although that was impossible, I knew when I saw her performance, which displayed the same composure and manners my mother had been trying to teach me my whole life, that I could also be an actress.

The one black female performer in those days who truly inspired me was Lena Horne. I was thirteen when I first saw her in
Words and Music,
the 1948 MGM musical based on the partnership of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Lena had a “guest appearance.” This was Hollywood's way of featuring black performers in white movies but not weaving them into plotlines so that their scenes could be cut from versions distributed in the South. It made me happy to know she was out there, and there was nobody else like her on-screen or onstage at the time. She just overwhelmed everyone with her beauty in a way that made race less relevant. Beauty and talent, it seemed, allowed race barriers to be relaxed.

I have to laugh at how my mother went out of her way to keep me from seeing Lena on film. I'm not sure if she didn't want me to compare myself to her or think that I didn't have a chance, because there was only room for one genteel black actress. Later, as my singing began to draw reviews and critics began to call me the second Lena Horne, I told them that I preferred to be known as the first Diahann Carroll. That came from my mother, who had nurtured me to believe that all things were indeed possible.

But that's getting ahead of the story. When I was a young teen, the only person comparing me to anyone on the big screen (other than my mother of course!) was me. I took in all kinds of movies and held them close to my heart—dramas, comedies, and, of course, musicals. And I carefully studied the performances in them, taking in every detail, from costumes to gesture, diction, and the impeccable timing of dialogue. My father found this level of interest a bit intense. “You need to focus on your textbooks,” he said. “You're going to college, not Hollywood.” But Mother was more complicit with my ambitions. She would always take the time, when she had it, to discuss the films we'd seen together.

We were as close as any mother and daughter could be, but I wasn't long for the racist troubles of Yonkers or a long commute to school in Harlem. To be able to maintain matriculation at the High School of Music and Art, I established residence with a single aunt in Manhattan. And every day in that school—full of the kind of intellectual curiosity and ambition I had never seen in classrooms before—I thrived. It made me question my mother's insulation, and wonder if I couldn't open her up to the world I was now reading about in Sunday's
New York Times
. But she was too busy to pay much attention to the needs of an adolescent with worldly pretensions. “Reading the
New York Times
is your assignment, not mine,” she'd tell me. She had to decorate her new house in Westchester and care for a second child. She filled her days with shopping for furniture and making her new home as impeccable as possible.

I filled my days with studying, music, and performing.

One day, a friend in the city took a picture of me posing in my sister's baby carriage and sent it to a fashion editor at
Ebony
magazine, one of the few national publications devoted to showing blacks at their best. I didn't look anything like the sophisticated models in the magazine, but to my surprise, six months later,
Ebony
responded with a letter. Much as I spent my life shopping with my mother, who adored clothes, neither of us actually knew the first thing about fashion. That much was clear when I dressed myself for a midtown Manhattan morning interview at Johnson Publications (
Ebony, Jet,
and
Sepia
were their magazines) in a gray taffeta cocktail dress that would only have been appropriate for evening. To make matters worse, I wore a lavender straw hat with a veil and matching lavender gloves. And instead of something as simple as stockings, I oiled my legs so they wouldn't look too ashy.

The fashion editor of
Ebony
opened the door to find, not the pretty young lady from the photographs, but a living example of how not to dress for a meeting. She must have been able to see past the lurid outfit to the high cheekbones, tall, slim figure, and sincere innocence of the little lady I actually was trained to be. So she hired me, and sent me off to a hairdresser who warned me to pay attention to all the makeup artists I'd meet before going in front of photographers. Right away I learned to carry a leather hatbox, containing black pumps, black and white gloves in various lengths, and my own makeup. I learned the difference between daywear and nightwear. I was getting a whole new education, one that my mother, I was intrigued to find, could not provide for me.

To further me along, someone at Johnson Publications recommended I enroll at Ophelia DeVore's Charm School in Harlem. One day I walked up a staircase just inside a door on a bustling 125th Street to find a tall, imposing woman with a stern but kindly look in her eye. I loved Ophelia DeVore and her stylish staff of strong-minded women at first sight. Mrs. DeVore was very charming, well dressed, and committed to teaching us how to carry ourselves properly as young ladies who hoped to have careers in modeling and onstage. She instructed with a kind of caring gentility. She knew we were from underprivileged backgrounds and we didn't have the money or sophistication to have been raised to understand the finer things in life, including social graces and posture. “You must tuck under, and keep the shoulders straight,” she'd tell me if my behind was not aligned with my head. Unlike today, when sex seems to inform every step, girls were chastised in class for the slightest flirtatious movement. “You're walking too seductively, and that's not the way to get work as a model,” we were told. To pay for class, I became a part-time receptionist. I'd sit outside Mrs. DeVore's large studio, lined with mirrors, and inhale the mannerly ambience she had created.

My first job for Johnson Publications was to pose with a few other teenagers in petticoats. Imagine how my father responded to that! There I was in a magazine read by his community, posing only in a bra and petticoat, and he was so upset I had to agree never to pose in those kinds of shots again. I was far too young at the time to tell him he was in danger of being a hypocrite. Much as he liked to promote only the most upright behavior, he was taking the flirting in our church just a little
too far. Well, that church, after all, was full of women terribly excited to be under the same roof as the stunningly handsome Adam Clayton Powell Sr. And any handsome male whom women there would see (and especially one in black tie and white gloves serving as a deacon, like my father) turned their well-pressed and-curled heads. It's only recently that I have come to realize that a church where everyone is looking his or her best can also become something of a henhouse, and maybe even a brothel. At any rate, my father had been unfaithful for years. I still remember the time he took me with him to visit the home of one of his female “friends.” She lived on St. Nicholas Avenue, not far from us, in a well-appointed apartment. Even at the age of seven, I knew something was not proper when she greeted us at her door in a flowing peignoir. Prim and proper in my patent-leather shoes and sky-blue smock dress as innocent as anything Shirley Temple was wearing, I sat down in her small front parlor. It was stuffy. A clock on the mantel was ticking, making me feel like a bomb about to explode. They chatted for a while, and the woman said some pleasant things to me about my church singing. But I knew being with her was terribly wrong even then. By osmosis, I had learned from my parents what was and wasn't proper. I was ashamed for all of us.

And so, in my mind, the strict churchgoing father with family values had no real grounds for objecting to my posing in petticoats in a magazine. But I agreed that I had done something wrong in order to placate him. Soon enough, people from the neighborhood and at church found me posing in that spread, and congratulated him. I think he was surprised at how impressed they all were. But then, I was soon getting paid
ten dollars an hour, an impressive sum in those days that went right into my college account. It was hard for my father to put up much of an argument. I was succeeding, even before college, in a way that my driven, disciplined parents had never expected.

The more I modeled for Johnson Publications, the more I supplemented what I was learning at the High School of Music and Art. Innocent as I was, I was getting a chance to see the unimaginably cosmopolitan worlds of successful black editors and publishers, who had secretaries and expense accounts. It was the 1950s in New York City, and seeing a woman like Freda DeKnight, the fashion editor of
Ebony,
riding in a limousine to a photo shoot on Sutton Place left a deep impression, to say the least. I knew I had my mother to thank for preparing me for all this, and pushing me off the cliff, as it were, to take on the life of a model and a performer, but I never thanked her.

My success was thanks enough for her in those days.

I had a friend in high school named Elissa Oppenheim. She was a piano player and I was a singer. We'd practice together at each other's home and worked on an act that we were sure would break us into show business. She was the one who wrote to
Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts
for an audition. It was a very popular television show in the early 1950s. When we got our audition, the name of our act, Oppenheim and Johnson, was deemed too imposing, according to a sharp-tongued producer who met with us. At the time I didn't see the point. But it is a bit of a mouthful, I suppose, for a couple of teenage girls with a high sincerity level. So Elissa changed her name to
Lisa Collins, and for me she suggested Diahann Carroll. It turned out my first name was spelled that way on my birth certificate anyway, as I soon found out when applying for a job at Macy's.