The Legs Are the Last to Go (10 page)

A couple years into our relationship, after I helped him pay off his Palm Springs home, Vic proposed to me in the bedroom of my house in Beverly Hills. By then, he'd already moved in. I was completely under his spell. And of course it was so lovely to have a companion to sleep with and plan things with and go out with. I don't remember the exact words, but our conversation was surprisingly profound. We were both talking about how taken aback we were at the depth of our feelings for each other. I mean we weren't children. We'd both been around the block, with a half dozen marriages between us. But we really did love each other, so we decided to get married.

I suppose that's when the real trouble started. A few days before the wedding, we were performing at a hotel in the Catskills. We were doing a show together by then, sharing a bill, but keeping our egos in check by switching whose name would go first on advertising for each venue. I was sur
prised that he cared. As usual, he was far more concerned about playing golf than rehearsing. “I have a tee-off at noon,” he'd say.

“But we have an orchestra to rehearse,” I'd reply.

“You go ahead, you know the act.” And off he went with his golf buddies.

It made me more than anxious. It infuriated me. I'd always surrounded myself with consummate professionals, who took pleasure in the hard work of getting things exactly right. Vic was something else entirely. He relied on his charm and his lovely voice, and expected to be given a pass on any real work. He left it to me to hold things together, and make sure all the pieces fell into place for every show. And I never spoke to him about this irresponsible behavior. Something about him didn't allow me to think clearly as an adult. He always created a kind of whirlwind around us that threw me off balance. But our show always came off well. We'd sing romantic songs to each other, and saunter across the stage arm in arm, like a couple of kids in love. The truth is that as tense as he could make me, we were still terribly giddy together, and I loved watching him do his thing onstage and he loved watching me do mine. The audiences adored us this way, looking gaga for each other. Our big number was “How Do You Keep the Music Playing?” Later, when we were so angry that we could hardly stand on the same stage together, it would become a very good question.

Our wedding was to be in Atlantic City, where we were performing. As much as I'm a control freak, and completely capable of running my life, selling houses, taking care of fi
nances, I never have control of myself around men. I knew our relationship wasn't ideal. But I didn't stop to think about what an impending fourth marriage really meant. That's not to say I didn't almost call the whole thing off when Vic decided not to travel with me from our Catskills job to Atlantic City because he wanted to spend another day on the golf course.

“We have a show and a wedding in three days,” I pleaded. “What is this about?”

“My friends are telling me you have too much control over me,” he said.

“What are you talking about? You can do whatever you want, Vic.”

“What will our marriage be like if I can't play golf when I like?”

“But we have so much to do in the next three days. Please!”

“No, Diahann. My friends are laughing at me, and I'm going to stay to play golf.”

I was so furious that when I got to our suite in Atlantic City, I had the management padlock the door, and I remember thinking, “Oh my God, this is so embarrassing.” Then, when he finally arrived, our friends and family got us together for a crisis intervention. I remember everyone sitting together in my suite and politely asking if we really wanted to go through with the wedding. If we were discussing anything else, real estate, a show, a management question, I would have been levelheaded and seen things clearly and called it off. I mean, I was fifty years old by then. But I still had no idea how to express my true
feelings when it came to men. Surely I knew that it would have been better to have an affair with this man than to marry him?

“Diahann,” my good friend Amy had told me, “he doesn't read books! What are you doing?”

What
was
I doing? Competing with Elizabeth Taylor in husband collecting?

At any rate, it was too late to stop it, or so I thought at the time. The press was coming to Atlantic City to cover the wedding, print and television. All our guests were arriving. Somehow we kissed and made up and went on with the show. That wedding really was a show, all about our outfits and hair and makeup. It was mostly his friends, and just a few of mine with my family. And officiating was a minister who looked like he was straight out of Central Casting. “Who is this man marrying us?” I kept thinking. “Where did he come from?” Then we went and played lovers onstage in the casino. There's one line in “How Do You Keep the Music Playing?” that asks the most important question. “How do you lose yourself to someone and never lose your way?” I wish I could have figured that one out then and there.

 

The truth is, as I've said, I have never been levelheaded around men.

In fact, I look back on my behavior now and wonder what the hell I was thinking. Maybe that's what happens when you become a senior citizen. You see yourself with clarity for
the first time in your life. After so many unsuccessful relationships that put me at my worst, I'm glad to finally be on my own.

I mean, for God's sake, I was dating a married man when I was nineteen! James Edwards was a beautiful man and a very good actor. He was also an alcoholic. I would wait in my hotel room in Los Angeles, after long days of shooting
Carmen Jones,
hoping he would call. If and when the phone finally rang, he'd demand that I meet him downstairs in twenty minutes. He was always angry at the powers that be—roles for him did not come as he wanted them to. He made it his business to brag about dalliances with wives of producers he was meeting for lunch the next day. Why was I so bedazzled? To my still-maturing mind, he seemed so in control, so confident. At the time, I was still so skinny and devoid of sexuality that I didn't think of myself as attractive. Suddenly here was this handsome movie star courting me. How could I keep a level head?

One Saturday night, he led me upstairs to a bedroom at the hotel in which he was staying and told me to take off my clothes. I stripped to my undergarments, totally confused, as he stared at me from a chair across the room. Then he got up to leave me alone. “You stay here,” he said. “I'll let you know when you can go.” He closed the door and I heard him locking it from outside with a key. I remained there for hours, waiting passively. He didn't come for me until the next day. But I never screamed, “How dare you!” or that we were finished. This was definitely a lack-of-self-esteem issue.

Broadway rescued me from him. When
Carmen Jones
was over, I left James Edwards and Los Angeles behind, and took
the red-eye back to New York for my second audition for the ingenue role in
House of Flowers
. On my way from the airport, I stopped to get my hair styled and dozed off in the chair. When I awoke, I looked in the mirror and screamed. I looked like a little boy. I apologized when I got to the theater. But out from the darkness I heard Truman Capote's eerily high Southern drawl. “Oh, don't apologize,” he said. “Your hair is just marvelous, it couldn't be more perfect.” Then I sat down at the edge of the stage and charmed my way into the part. Maybe it was the jet lag. But it could have been that my time in Hollywood had relaxed me just enough.

The casting director was a handsome man named Monte Kay. He had rejected me the first time I auditioned. But when we were performing the show in Philadelphia, he came backstage to praise my performance and he asked me out to dinner. Looking very cosmopolitan in a well-cut gray suit, he carried himself with confident ease. I had my first taste of oysters and clams on the half shell with him that night. I loved his face, rugged, with a strong nose and a dimple on the chin. Clearly, there was a mutual attraction, although I was as innocent as he was worldly. Well, he was eleven years my senior. He was also white. But how was I to know? He was dark with extremely curly hair, after all. When a friend told me otherwise, I was shocked. I ran to the phone.

“Monte, are you white?” I asked him.

“Yes, and I'm Jewish, too,” he answered. “Is that all right?”

I couldn't think of a reason why it wasn't, unless of course I thought about what my parents might think. He was divine.
He made me laugh, and feel like a grown-up after my disastrous and strange relationship in Hollywood with an alcoholic married man.

“But why are you so brown?” I asked.

“Because I love the sun and I love my sunlamp,” he said. “I like being tan.”

He had also loved being around musicians ever since he was a kid and would sneak into Greenwich Village from Brooklyn to hear jazz. He went to churches to hear gospel music, too. While still in his teens, he produced concerts featuring Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Then he went on to open the nightclub Birdland, and to manage the brilliant Modern Jazz Quartet. For him, my race was no problem; in fact, just the opposite. When my mother saw how wonderful he was to me, and how caring and amused he was by me (even though I was a clueless child compared with everyone else he knew), she knew she had to take us seriously. So she arranged for Monte and me to meet with Adam Clayton Powell, by then a congressman, to have a serious conversation about our situation. It turned out that Monte and Adam were old pals from Birdland. Adam offered to perform the wedding ceremony for us in his home. We accepted. But my father did not find the interracial marriage acceptable. He had little trust for the white community, and felt I had betrayed him terribly. It broke my heart when he didn't attend the wedding in 1956.

Eventually, Dad came around, when he saw what a good man Monte was, thoughtful and very supportive of my career. But I started having my own problems with my marriage right
away. We were in Los Angeles after our wedding, and one morning I woke up in our room at the Beverly Hilton. Monte was outside on the balcony reading a book. He ignored me when I called out to him. I knew he could lose himself in his reading, but for some reason, on that day it unnerved me. I mean, this was the first time I had ever been away with a man—this was our honeymoon—and my husband, who I was to remain with for the rest of my life—was ignoring me. I felt a chasm open up in front of me, between us, like the fault line where an earthquake occurs. I have to say, it's all so laughable now. I had a smart husband, a kind man who loved to read. What was wrong with that? I've known so many swaggering men since Monte who didn't read, and were so anti-intellectual that it made me yearn for someone with a brain. But what did I know at twenty-one years old? I stormed out to the balcony to pull Monte off his book, and engage him. He kept reading. I pressed up against him, and all he did was glare at me and go back to his pages.

I guess I was supposed to remain quiet until he was ready to talk. Instead, I ran back into the room, dove onto the bed, and banged my fist against the walls.

“Why don't you like me?” I screamed. “Why won't you speak to me?”

Monte was shocked. He'd always been able to retreat into his reading, and the women he'd been with before accepted his need for quiet. Not me. I wanted attention when I wanted it. I pounded the walls and carried on until he looked up.

“What's the matter with you, Diahann? What do you want from me?” he asked.

“Anything! I'll take anything,” I said. “Just answer me when I talk to you!”

“I'll answer you later. You can see I'm reading.”

“You can't ignore me like this!”

I'm still not sure what caused this outburst from me. I was a young bride and I wanted to assert myself, I suppose, and although I'd been raised to be polite, I'd also been raised to feel that I was a special little princess. Maybe my dreadful affair with James Edwards just a couple years before had made me overly sensitive. Oh, who knows what was wrong with me? At the time, I thought nothing, that this was all Monte's fault.

Fifty years and four marriages later, I know the fault was mine.

We did love each other, even as we disagreed, and we did want to make it work. So I tried to be less demanding and he tried to be more attentive. We bought an apartment on Tenth Avenue in Manhattan, and I threw myself into decorating it as if it were the only thing in the world that mattered to me. Monte was surprised and so were his friends. They wondered aloud, “Who's this bourgeois girl he married, obsessed with the furniture department at Macy's and chattering on about appliances and window treatments?” When the apartment was totally decorated, I went back out on singing jobs.

Three years after I got married, I was singing at a club called the Black Orchid in Chicago (where I almost walked off the stage because a man in the audience was heckling me with racist remarks) when an offer came for me to play a supporting role in the film version of
Porgy and Bess
. I didn't want to do it. I liked being the star of my own show, and didn't see the point
of being in the background, especially of another film with more predictable scenes of a tawdry impoverished life on Catfish Row. But Monte insisted it would be good for my career. I suppose it was. But it wreaked havoc on my marriage and the next ten years of my life. It was on the set of that movie that I met Sidney Poitier.

© MGM Clip & Still.

IT'S NICE TO FIND I HAVE A SENSE OF HUMOR ABOUT
“l'Affair Poitier” now, from the comfort of my golden years. When I look back on it, I can only shake my head and perhaps even make the
tsk, tsk
sound the elders used to make during my South Carolina summers. What the hell was I thinking? Actually, I wasn't. I was letting someone else think for me, a habit that was really becoming my specialty act around men.

It was 1959. I was sitting at the office of Samuel Goldwyn to receive the new production schedule for
Porgy and Bess,
when he walked in—this incredibly beautiful jet-black man with the fierce eyes and the smooth gait of a panther. Cheekbones beyond fabulous. I immediately became anxious and kept crossing and uncrossing my legs as if I were doing some kind of cancan. I was sure he could see, and maybe even smell my discomfort. He exuded such sexuality and such commanding power that I felt completely unmoored in his presence. He went
around the room shaking hands, telling people, “I'm Sidney Poitier,” as if they didn't know the biggest black sensation in the world. He was a confident, brilliant man who, despite many accomplishments, had so many more to come, including being appointed ambassador to Japan from the Bahamas. Unlike James Edwards and others before him, he would not and could not be stopped by his race.

“I've looked forward to working with you,” he told me. Then he held me at length with both his arms, as if to suggest I was his captive. “We must talk.”

“Yes,” I squeaked.

I couldn't believe what I was feeling. I was a faithfully married woman. Sidney was married, too, and with children. But he was such a big star by then that all kinds of women had been throwing themselves at him. I, on the other hand, was anything but overtly sexual. Casual sex was out of the question for a white-glove-wearing girl like me. The cast of
Porgy and Bess
was staying at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood, and it was like a dormitory, with all of us eating and socializing together. I tried to avoid him as much as possible and at the same time was giddy thinking I might run into him. I might have been an actress, but I was fooling nobody pretending he didn't rock my world. But I guess it was the restraint of the clean and well-mannered young lady so carefully trained by her mother that eventually got to him. One day, he walked into my dressing room, surprising me so that I jumped from my chair.

“Diahann,” he said in a voice that was something between
a growl and a purr. “I'm having dinner with Ruby Dee and some friends tonight. Would you join us?”

“That sounds lovely,” I said. I should have known he had something more intimate in mind when he suggested he pick me up rather than meet me at the restaurant.

We arrived together, a handsome couple trying too hard to be incognito. Everyone in the entire room turned and stared. Ruby, who, with her husband, Ossie Davis, was close to Sidney and his wife, did not look comfortable with what she was seeing. We escalated from there to more dates, my attraction growing stronger and stronger. I was smitten, fascinated, and scared. One night when he walked me up to my room, I locked myself in the bathroom and told him I was taking a bath and good night, just to prevent anything from happening. Another time I hid in the closet when he came in looking for me. Desperate to stop myself from disaster, I invited Monte out for the weekend. We had a terrible time. I was too mesmerized by Sidney to enjoy sharing a bed with my own husband. “I don't know what's wrong with you,” Monte said at the end of three days. “But that was the worst weekend of my life.”

Monte was unhappy, and to my surprise, Sidney was furiously jealous, even though he was married.

But he had other things on his mind. The movie was under fire for being stereotyped and insulting to blacks. This was the reason I had not wanted to be involved in the first place. He was very political and very articulate about his opinions. And just as he wouldn't be pushed around by any woman, he would not be pushed around by any press agent or studio boss. He
certainly wouldn't allow any journalist to railroad him into conversations about the issues swirling around the
Porgy and Bess
set.

Not long ago, I was in Manhattan with a friend who begged me to go with him to a special screening of
Porgy and Bess
at the Ziegfeld Theater. A film historian had found a special print of it, and when we arrived, someone was giving a passionate speech.

“Movie musicals today are made by people who don't like musicals,” this man was telling a small audience that was completely devoid of blacks. “You have to readjust your viewing strategies because this film has the pace of yesterday.”

That's not all it had of yesterday. When the credits stopped rolling and the camera started panning across a dock of hardworking black folk on a bayou, I squirmed in my seat at the sight of this cliché of noble poverty as reimagined by some very talented white men, including Otto Preminger, the director, and, of course, George Gershwin. It should be said that, as Jews, they were sympathetic to the status of blacks as “others.” The trouble was, their sympathy felt demeaning. And walking among all those hardworking plain folk carrying their baskets of shrimp and fish, and humming to something that almost sounded like a spiritual (but as reinvented by a wonderful Jewish composer) was a slim young girl in a ratty ankle-length dress, holding a little baby. The girl opened her mouth to sing, and out of it came the most beautiful and wistful song: “Summertime and the living is easy!”

Never mind that her voice was dubbed because the original key was written for a soprano. The lovely young woman
was none other than me. But unfortunately, it was a little hard to tell because I was wearing a large bandanna on top of my head. It was as hideous a look as I ever had to endure, and all the more annoying after my recent glamorous appearances in nightclubs and on television. But it really didn't matter to me that I had to wear that bandanna. I had agreed to be in a picture that I didn't even want black children (who were struggling with the cruelties of segregation in the South at the time) to see. It was 1959 in America, when Miles Davis, a friend and neighbor of mine in Manhattan, was redefining the jazz idiom internationally, Lorraine Hansberry was writing landmark plays, and Nina Simone was singing “Young, Gifted and Black,” and this movie was depicting us as poor, uneducated, drug-dealing, libidinous, and totally unsophisticated. This big-deal, big-budget movie was doing nothing to depict blacks in a positive light. Rather, it was throwing us back. But the music? It was divine!

So I did as I was told and wore the bandanna. “Your career is coming along nicely,” I reminded myself daily, “and soon this film will be over and you can go back to your pearls and evening gowns.” Then, one day on the set, Mr. Preminger said with his German accent, “Why are you always wearing that thing on your head? We can't see you.” So I took the thing off for the rest of the shoot that day.

The next thing I knew I was being summoned to see Samuel Goldwyn, the producer. His wife, Frances, met me outside his office. She was adorable, a housewife who wanted to work, and she was flustered about something. It was hard to take her seriously. As I recall, my visit started with her ad
miring the elegant capri pants I was wearing, and I thought to myself, “This is going to be the dumbest conversation of my life.” But then she stopped with the chitchat and got a very concerned look on her face, as if the situation were dire.

“You do know why you're here today, don't you, Diahann?” she said.

I told her I had no idea.

“Mr. Goldwyn went berserk when he saw the rushes.”

“Why? What happened?”

“You weren't wearing your bandanna!”

“Oh, that's right, so what is the plan?”

“He wants to see you” is all she said.

So we went into the most ostentatious office I have ever seen. Mr. Goldwyn was a little man who was sitting in a chair as big as a throne. He hardly took a moment to greet me before he said, “I am not going to allow you to ruin this film!”

I knew better than to ask why until he had finished spouting.

“You cannot make decisions about your wardrobe or hair or anything else unless it goes through your director!”

In a calm voice, hiding my fear, I asked what exactly he was talking about.

“This is not the place for you to decide that you look better without a head scarf,” he barked at me. “All you have to do is do as you're told!”

He may have been justifiably upset, but that was no way to talk to a Harlem princess. I was now trembling, and I knew I had to be careful because I had a reputation of being kind of
fresh, not difficult, just strong-willed. So I looked him in the eye and said, “I'm sorry, Mr. Goldwyn, but even my own father would never speak to me in that manner.” I saw Frances Goldwyn's jaw drop. Sam Goldwyn's face remained stonelike. “But if you'd like to discuss the scarf, I'd be happy to tell you what happened.”

Fortunately, I didn't have to, because at that moment Otto Preminger came in and told Mr. Goldwyn that removing the head scarf had been his idea, not mine.

“You really should let her go home now,” he said.

He was protecting me, but he was also protecting his production. He knew I was a feisty little lady. “Don't worry about this at all,” Otto said as he walked me to my car.

“You know I would never do anything you don't tell me to do,” I told him.

“I'll take care of everything,” he said.

If only he could have taken care of how ridiculous the whole movie was, with its silly squalor, Sammy Davis Jr. hopping around like a blue jay, dancing and selling cocaine, Pearl Bailey talking like a strident, trashy black woman, and most of all, Sidney on strange little knee crutches, making moon eyes at Dorothy Dandridge.

“Bess, you is my woman now,” he pretended to sing in a basso profundo.

Well, I have to say, only Sidney was beautiful enough to pull off being a sex symbol who crawled around on the floor. He had those aforementioned cheekbones, and he just reeked of nobility and dignity, even amid all that art-directed Negro squalor.

What can I say? It didn't work for me then and it still doesn't now.

I sat through the recent
Porgy and Bess
screening in New York for a while. But it became too tedious. So I got up with my friend and we quietly ditched the Ziegfeld Theater.

In Los Angeles, it was a lot harder to ditch Sidney. Toward the end of the filming, after weeks of meeting for dinner, finding time for quiet walks, Sidney and I were taking a walk near the Chateau one night when he grabbed me.

“All right! All right! I love you,” he said.

“And I love you, too,” I replied.

We finally said it. And we kissed, then we held each other tight and cried.

“What are we going to do?” I asked.

He didn't know. He loved me, but he loved his wife, who was a good mother and, to make matters more difficult, a good Catholic. She had stuck with him through his worst years. Now, he said, she would ruin him and take his children, too. I said that I would not be able to have an affair while married to Monte, and would have to leave him first. After the movie wrapped, we would both be back in New York. Sidney was going to be in
A Raisin in the Sun
. I wanted to audition, too, but he was not encouraging me. He simply could not imagine that a woman would want a career in show business. “Diahann, what is the point?” he once said, sighing. Strange as it sounds for an actor, he hated anything that suggested artifice, even the promotional photos for my nightclub act.

“What is all this makeup?” he said. “You look ridiculous.”

I was too flustered to do good work in front of him at
my audition for
A Raisin in the Sun,
and didn't get the part. But gossip was spreading. Monte worried that it was true. “Are you involved with Sidney Poitier?” he asked. The truth was I wasn't. It would be several years before we acted on our attraction.

Sidney did his Broadway play. I went back to singing, and was so grateful that Monte helped me negotiate my contracts to sing at the Plaza's Persian Room. Meanwhile, though we had traded Los Angeles for New York, Sidney and I continued to see each other. He would call me at home and hang up if Monte answered the phone. We'd meet at sleazy Times Square movie houses. After months of talk, we finally decided that Sidney would leave his wife and I would leave my husband and check into the Waldorf-Astoria. He would register at another hotel. The morning I was leaving our apartment on Tenth Avenue, Monte was next to me in bed. I abruptly turned to him and said, “I've fallen in love with Sidney Poitier, and I'm leaving you.” He kicked me to the floor. Then he began to cry. We both did. I packed my things with my head spinning, feeling nauseous and so weak that it was difficult to lift even the lightest item.

When Sidney arrived at the hotel that night, he did something very strange. He looked over at my small suitcase and asked, “Is that all you brought? You don't plan to stay very long, do you?” He was suddenly in a frenzy. “I knew you wouldn't be able to really leave your marriage,” he barked. “I knew you wouldn't do it!” It was very confusing, until I asked him the name of his hotel and realized he had not moved out of his house in Westchester. Nor did he tell his wife he wanted
a divorce. I was too upset to say anything, and too paralyzed to take any action. I heard traffic below us on Park Avenue, and yearned to be out there on the street rather than trapped in this situation. But I just sat there, all nerves, but in silence. Finally Sidney looked at his watch and said he needed to be home to help put his children to bed. At three in the morning, I called Monte. He wasn't asleep. He said to come home to talk.

I did, and discovered that while Monte was hurt, it helped for him to know I had never slept with Sidney. Maybe we could reconcile. Later, Sidney called.