The Legs Are the Last to Go Page 2

  I go through this every time I audition. Even after NBC hired me to play Julia, a nurse and single mother, Hal Kanter, the creator of the show, had reservations. He was a charming and outspoken white Southerner who’d been a writer for Amos ’n’ Andy, among many other projects, and he had a firm sense of what Middle America wanted for its first African-American sitcom star in 1968. And despite the network’s faith in me, Hal was not completely convinced that I was the right woman for the role. He felt my image was too worldly and glamorous.

  Well, I had won a Tony for playing a chic model in Paris for Richard Rodgers on Broadway, and I had done several Hollywood films with Otto Preminger. I performed in luxurious venues in New York, Las Vegas, and Miami, and had appeared on beautifully produced television specials for years. I was one of those fortunate performers—and there might have been only a dozen of us in total—who went from show to show—Ed Sullivan, Dean Martin, Judy Garland—holiday specials, shows about everything from Broadway to black humor. I was even chosen in 1967 to costar with Maurice Chevalier in the first collaboration between French and American television. Every appearance was more lavish than the next.

  Hal Kanter knew all about my jet-set lifestyle when NBC told him he was to meet with me. I knew about his hesitancy, so for our first meeting, I dressed carefully—to look modest, and though it was a Givenchy, the line was so simple, I knew it would work—and walked into the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel.

  I was told later that he didn’t recognize me. “That’s the look I want for this character,” he told a colleague. “A well-dressed housewife just like that woman.”

  Then I came over to the table and he discovered that “that woman” was me.

  “Hal,” I said. “I know I can do this. I’m an actress. You saw me come through that door and I convinced you that I could be a housewife. Well, guess what? I prepared to be a housewife for this interview. And I think this is how Julia would dress.”

  I have to say, preparing to audition for Norma Desmond was less of a stretch. Although I’ve always considered myself more of a worker than a diva, I could relate to the character of an extravagant actress in the twilight of her career. I felt so much pressure for my Sunset Boulevard audition. I knew I was the first black actress to be considered for the role, and worked very hard to keep that thought out of my head as I rehearsed with my pianist. I was intent on nailing the character of a sixty-year-old woman living in complete denial, no matter what color she is.

  In situations like that, one question rises to the surface above all others: What the hell am I going to wear? The day of the audition, I changed outfits several times and left clothes all over my bedroom, as if I were a teenager on a first date. Finally I decided that the most dramatic look (that wouldn’t come off as being stark raving mad) was a white ensemble—white trousers, white blouse, and to really push it, a white Burberry raincoat. Then, to take it up another notch, I added a white fedora. It was very dramatic, if not completely obsessive. But then, I am one of those people who cannot leave the house without overthinking an outfit. I looked anything but casual.

  I made a decision that I would drive myself that day rather than use a driver. I arrived at the Shubert Theater in Century City to be greeted by the pianist I was to work with, a lovely young man named Paul. “Miss Carroll, it’s so wonderful,” he said. “Sir Andrew is in town and he wants to hear you sing!” Now I knew some of the history of this production. I knew that Glenn Close was playing Norma Desmond in Los Angeles, and that Betty Buckley was playing her in New York. I also knew that Faye Dunaway had cost the producers a good deal of money in a role that ended up not being right for her. Lastly, I knew that the job I was up for was not in the New York or Los Angeles productions, but in Toronto. If I got the part, I’d be living there at least a year.

  It didn’t matter. I wanted to play Norma Desmond.

  The agreement for the audition was that I would work with the pianist provided by the producers for forty-five minutes so that we could find our way through the song I had chosen to sing, which was the beautiful main ballad from the show, “As If We Never Said Goodbye.” Usually I bring my own pianist, with whom I’ve prepared extensively. This was a different situation, one that made me a little uncomfortable. But I started to work with Paul, and it was going well, when the door to the rehearsal room burst open. It was Sir Andrew himself. He strode up to us, waved his hand at the pianist, and said, “I’ll take over, I’ll do this with her.” My heart started pounding. The pianist looked at me and I looked at him with complete terror in my eyes.

  Sir Andrew threw himself down at the piano and played a chord or two. Then he looked up at me and said, with his arch and intimidating English accent, “So sing something!”

  “Sing something?” I repeated.

  “Sing anything. How about ‘Melancholy Baby’?”

  I said, “‘Melancholy Baby’? Why?”

  “Why not?” he said.

  “Is this a show about a saloon?” I found myself continuing. “Can we maybe try a love song instead, something that isn’t too difficult, like ‘More Than You Know’?”

  “No, I don’t know that,” he said.

  I could instantly see that he was not to be spoken to like that, worker to worker. So even as I tried to remain calm my nerves started fraying. I’d worked with composers my whole life, and they were almost always wonderful to me, nurturing and open-minded, treating me as if I were a colleague, not an employee. I had never come across anyone who behaved like the “star creator.” Harold Arlen, one of our greatest composers, was so modest and sweet. He never tried to impress or impose.

  After a few disagreeable minutes of having to hold my ground and not sing a saloon song, Sir Andrew said to me, “Well, what is it that you came prepared to sing?”

  I told him it was the ballad “As If We Never Said Goodbye” from his show.

  “All right, then why don’t you go ahead and sing it?”

  He played a few bars. I could tell the key was not in my vocal register.

  “I’m afraid that isn’t my key,” I said.

  “Well, give it a try anyway,” he said. “Let’s hear what you can do.”

  That key he selected was more likely to showcase what I couldn’t do. I could not believe this was happening. But I would not capitulate, either. I had not spent all these many years in my profession only to be denied what was due to me. I suspected that Sir Andrew was unhappy with me for being a singer who played Vegas more often than Broadway. And although I had not given it any thought, I suddenly couldn’t help wondering if behind this complete disregard for the basic courtesy due a performer was a creator of a show who was perhaps a little dubious about casting a black actress as Norma Desmond. Let me be clear. Casting is a taste business, so any number of reasons can form a decision. And this was not obvious racism. I’d seen that at work. Obvious racism is when people yell terrible remarks while you’re singing, as they did when I played nightclubs in my early years. Out-and-out racism is when the Count Basie Orchestra is not allowed to stay at a hotel in Las Vegas in the 1950s until Frank Sinatra himself has to explain to management that the Basie orchestra has to be housed at the hotel where he was living. Obvious racism is when the sponsor of a 1968 Petula Clark television special tries to delete a moment when she affectionately touches Harry Belafonte’s arm because bodily contact was deemed unacceptable between races.

  Obvious racism is when a cabdriver noticed I was black after he’d stopped for me in front of my apartment on Riverside Drive many years ago, and started driving away with me holding on to the door handle. I was being dragged down the street. The doormen on both sides of my street came running over to my aid. When I stood up, they asked if I was okay.

  “I’m fine, but I have to have his number to report him,” I said.

  The doormen helped a moment before disappearing. Clearly, they didn’t want to get involved. So I took off my kid gloves, got a pen out of my Kelly bag, and took down the cab number. As I wa
s doing so, the driver said, “What are you going to do? Report me? All that means is I lose a day.”

  “We’ll see,” I said as I finished writing his number down.

  “Why waste your time and my time?” he said, snickering.

  Because he needed to see that I took his racism seriously, that’s why. I took him to court downtown, a place I’d been several times before to report taxis that had not picked me up. And he was docked five days, an order I knew he didn’t actually have to adhere to. But I felt much better knowing that cabdrivers in that courtroom that day realized that some people of color will not allow that kind of behavior.

  Of course that was nothing compared with what I experienced years before, in 1957, when I was singing in Lake Tahoe at a hotel. It was early in my career and I was not traveling with my own musicians. On our first night, the orchestra conductor began to get closer to me onstage. He backed up and was right alongside me. I looked at him as if to say, “Why are you standing next to me?” I was the star singer, and he was supposed to be conducting the orchestra, not moving closer to the audience into my spotlight. It seemed to me he was trying to tell me he did not want to be in the position of conducting for me. But I didn’t say anything. After the second night of this same strange usurping of my space, I approached him after the show and asked what had happened. The entire orchestra was listening.

  “What was it? Did you have trouble hearing me?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer. But the next night he did the same thing, backing into my spotlight again. I was performing in my demure gown and pearls, and he was in a white dinner jacket, shoulder to shoulder with me, waving his arms around, conducting. It was a complete distraction and completely unacceptable. While the audience was applauding me I turned to ask him in a stage whisper, “Why are you standing next to me? I don’t understand.”

  That’s when he snapped, “These people don’t want to hear a nigger sing.”

  Then he turned to start the orchestra on the next song, and feeling winded, I took a breath and went on to sing my Ethel Waters medley.

  Backstage later, I asked the members of the orchestra if they heard his remark.

  “Yes, we did,” one musician said.

  “We’ve been waiting for you to find out,” said another. “He can’t stand the fact that he has to conduct for you. He’s a nasty racist and he especially hates black people.” I stood there, stunned, reminding myself not to allow this ignorant man to force me to behave inappropriately, so slapping his face was out of the question! “Oh,” I said quietly in front of the musicians, who looked very uncomfortable. “Well, I’ll have to see what I can do about this.”

  Several musicians told me that anything I wanted to do, they would support. They had traveled around the country too often not to know there were all kinds of problems of prejudice that musicians had to face, not just as artists but as Jews, Italians, and Hispanics. And they did not understand how anyone in their own profession, a fellow artist, could be so provincial and hateful. I called the police and the union.

  The police took my report. “Have you been harmed?” they asked.

  “No,” I told them, “but I’ve been the target of racist slurs.”

  I had not decided if I’d even go on to perform the next night until I learned what response I would get from the phone calls I’d made. The union contacted me, then contacted the conductor and threatened him, and that frightened him. So he came into my dressing room.

  “What did you tell these people?” he said with a laugh.

  “That you told me the audience doesn’t want to hear a nigger sing,” I said.

  “Oh, come on.” He snickered. “You know I was only joking.”

  I said, “Well, I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. You are going to apologize to me in front of the entire orchestra for joking in such a way.”

  “Are you crazy?” he asked.

  “If you don’t,” I said, “I will not perform.”

  He shook his head as if I were out of my mind.

  But I went ahead and gathered the orchestra into the rehearsal room. And the conductor, who I later learned had been a member of the Little Rascals (he played Porky), stood there with me and said something like, “Diahann Carroll here is accusing me of racist remarks.” He didn’t say he was sorry for his behavior.

  “But actually,” I said, “I would like you to apologize to me and to all of us. Your remark was an insult to what we do.”

  He just laughed at me, shook his head, and walked out.

  I asked the musicians, “So what do I do now? The only thing I can do is quit.”

  We gathered in my hotel room for a meeting. We all agreed that we would all suffer if I didn’t go on with my booking. Nobody would get paid. There was no way around it. So I simply asked to have this man removed from my show. An assistant conducted instead. It’s not a big payoff ending, but it took care of the problem at hand.

  That was real racism. What I was facing with Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber wasn’t anything in that league. He had mentioned at some point during our awkward meeting that no silent-screen stars were black. And I told him there was no Norma Desmond, either. “She’s a fictional character,” I said. But I still don’t know to this day why he was so keen on maligning me at that audition when he saw me becoming so anxious in his presence.

  “All right, so I’ll give you a chord, now go ahead and sing,” he was telling me.

  “But I was told I could rehearse with a pianist before presenting it,” I said.

  “What do you mean?” he said briskly. “Come on. Just sing it. Just sing!”

  I was completely unmoored now. And quite frankly, I figured at this point he didn’t want to work with me if I was being so difficult. So my dream of getting this part was pretty much falling apart. But I did not break out into a sweat and feel my throat go dry. I knew what I had been promised. I had been told that I would have forty-five minutes to work with a pianist before singing for the producers, director, and creator of the show. Finally they phoned my agent and he defended my contractual agreement in no uncertain terms. He suggested they let me go home. “So you really won’t sing?” Sir Andrew asked.

  “I will,” I said. “And I’m sorry, but I really want to have a moment to prepare.”

  And with that, I was shown the door. The rehearsal pianist walked me out of the dark theater into the parking lot and accompanied me to my car, a Rolls. It was champagne-and chocolate-colored, and looking regal in a lonely, sunlit lot.

  “That’s not your car, is it?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s my car.”

  He shook his head and laughed. It was just too Norma Desmond.

  “I have driven a Rolls for years,” I said.

  To be honest, I was a little embarrassed. On the one hand, a Rolls is a power statement in a town in which dropping off and picking up at valet parking is a form of ritual display. But on the other hand, I knew that driving one when I was not at the top of anyone’s list anymore was a slightly dangerous choice of statement making, and more than a little “Norma Desmond” in the eyes of the all-knowing types in Los Angeles.

  Sending the wrong message can get you in trouble in this town. And the worst message of all is when you’re driving a fancy car that is in need of repair.

  1n 1976, I was truly wondering where my life was going. My hit albeit controversial series Julia was long over. So was my summer television series, The Diahann Carroll Show. Dynasty was in the future, but I had no idea of that then. Show business had already started to change, and singers like me who loved nothing more than performing the standards of the older generation were being challenged by everything from the Bee Gees to Motown. Around that time, I remember quite clearly the sight of a bright yellow Bentley convertible coming at me on Coldwater Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills. I had never seen such a color in my life except on a taxicab in New York. Behind the wheel of this lurid yellow car was this tiny black woman with a huge head of hair flying in the wind.
As she drove past me, I recognized it was Diana Ross.

  “There goes the neighborhood,” I muttered to myself.

  Now, I know that sounds terrible. But you have to understand that in 1976, a bright yellow Bentley (or was it a Rolls?) was as out of place as Albert Einstein might have been in this town. And there’s no denying that I was just learning what to make of the influence of Motown on the music industry. I knew it was brilliant, but I simply couldn’t relate to it. I was immersed in an old-fashioned notion of elegance and sophistication and had no choice but to remain true to the music of Gershwin, Porter, and Ellington—what I knew and was raised on. All this new music represented a loss of footing for me. Yes, I’ll admit it, I was confused about Detroit, too. I was, after all, from New York, the apex of all things sophisticated, cultural, and old school. And like so many transplants, I was very defensive about giving up Manhattan for Los Angeles. So as I drove past that huge flashy yellow convertible, I probably didn’t want to admit how worried I was about my own career.

  It had not gone as well as I had hoped after three seasons of Julia. My summer variety show was successful and paid well, but it had come and gone, and it seemed to me that the era of lavish television specials was coming to an end. I was convinced that there was less demand for a chanteuse like me, a girl who became a singing star on television and in nightclubs wearing pearls. There was more interest in performers who were more soulful. The great Aretha Franklin. The singular Nina Simone. Our culture was rapidly changing and I knew I had to rethink my situation. Norma Desmond was appealing to act onstage, but in real life I had to embrace the new. So I set out to do just that. If I get an A for effort, I don’t get such high marks for execution. When I look back on The Carol Burnett Show and see myself in a macramé vest and silly hat, singing songs that just didn’t come naturally to me, I notice my own awkwardness. I was trying to adapt to the new trends—which change every ten years or so, requiring those of us in the business to keep on our toes—but that was not for me. I was and always will be a chanteuse in the way I understand the term. That was hard to reconcile with the 1970s, an era of strident liberation. The only important film role I played during those years was representative of where the cultural interest was—as a welfare mother in the independent film Claudine. She was gritty, real, an honest black woman working her tail off. It was a great part. But no other roles were forthcoming, so I continued to travel. But in this new world, could I really still afford my Rolls and my mansion in Benedict Canyon with a wine cellar, waterfall, and three-car garage?