The Legs Are the Last to Go (8 page)

The meeting ended, and Harold Arlen himself walked me to the elevator.

“I hear you might be going to California,” he said in his gentle voice.

“Yes, I think that's possible,” I replied.

“Well, I think it'll be good for you,” he continued. “Go,
have a ball, meet new people, and try to live a little!” He was too much of a gentleman to tell me I was too innocent and stiff, even to play an ingenue. I only understood that years later. It was not unlike what my mother had been trying to tell me when she suggested I have a glass of wine to relax before going onstage. I was too stiff, too correct, too fixated on the work—the technique of singing and working with musicians—to have fun and explore any feelings.

The same problem followed me to Hollywood. As did my mother.

Carmen Jones
was, as I said, an all-black version of Bizet's
Carmen,
reset in the American South with new lyrics and an unsettling amount of clichéd Southern dialogue. Otto Preminger, the director, had auditioned me for the lead but had cast the beautiful Dorothy Dandridge instead. At the audition, he made me do a scene with James Edwards, a famous actor at the time, in which he was told to paint my toenails. There was no way, at age nineteen, that I was prepared to handle such overt sexuality. Yes, I had a boyfriend back in New York by then, and we had consummated our relationship during an evening I faced with trepidation. But this was beyond my acting abilities. James Edwards, a terribly worldly and seductive man, tried to make me comfortable as we read our lines. But when he finished applying the polish, and blowing on my toes, I had to fight back the nervous giggles of a child. This was not the kind of silly innocence anyone expected from a trained New York performer.

“You! Where are you from?” Mr. Preminger asked.

I froze with fear, then told him.

“And how old are you?”

Sounding more child than woman, I answered, “Nineteen.”

“And whoever told you that you were sexy?”

“No one,” I shot back.

Then the bullying, all-powerful director threw back his head and laughed.

Dorothy Dandridge got the lead role, and was later nominated for an Academy Award for her performance. Me? I got the role of one of Carmen's sidekicks. It was a small part, but my first big Hollywood break.

It was exciting, in some ways, and discouraging in others. I wasn't too fond of the vulgar, bright red, fringed dress I had to wear with big hoop gypsy earrings. And I especially didn't appreciate a script full of “dees, dems, and dats” to make us sound intentionally down market. The cast, including Pearl Bailey and Harry Belafonte, was superb, and I was delighted to be the young one working with them, just as I loved sitting quietly by Otto Preminger and watching him direct. I was always trying to learn. But it also became quite clear that we were the only blacks on the Paramount lot. It was only temporarily for this “black movie” (there was usually one every few years) that our presence in Hollywood was wanted. We all knew there'd be little place for us after the movie wrapped. Everyone on staff was polite, but thought of us as outsiders.

But you know who was thrilled about everything, start to finish? My mother.

Although I never said I needed her with me, she flew out to Los Angeles to be my chaperone during the shoot. The cast
was staying at a little hotel, the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard. I made sure that my mother was not across the hall, but rather at the other end of the building, passing the time with a friend. They played cards. They had some cocktails, and would go out to lunch or dinner. I was fully aware that she had no reason to be there. My father and sister were home in Yonkers. She did not need to chaperone me, and she was of no use helping me memorize lines or negotiate the business. I could do that with other actors. I was so swamped most days I could barely find the mental energy to check in with her for ten minutes. But I did. “How was your day? What did you do?” I'd ask. She never did much of anything. I felt guilty about that, just as I felt guilty for not inviting her to the set. I knew she hoped to visit. But professionals don't do that. Or maybe the truth is that when you're a novice, you don't want to draw attention to your youth by showing up with your mother. The one time I asked her out to join me for a business dinner, it just felt completely awkward and uncomfortable.

My mother, I'm afraid, was now loving my life far too much.

I certainly got a deep, delicious early taste of Hollywood while in
Carmen Jones
. Sammy Davis Jr., who was becoming a star at the time, had a suite in our hotel, and invited me around all the time. One night, while we were on location in Stockton, California, he asked me to join a group for dinner in a local restaurant. I appeared in my typical formal elegance in a black cocktail dress and white gloves. Sammy gently escorted me to a corner. “You look lovely as always,” he told me quietly. “But I think you better remove the gloves, Diahann. We're in Stock
ton, not Paris!” He invited me to a party in his suite in West Hollywood another night. There, he introduced me to the painfully shy Marlon Brando. The next night, a friend of Sammy's asked me to join them for dinner. Marlon was accompanied by his girlfriend, and she was dressed in something so blatantly revealing that I became embarrassed and could hardly speak all evening. Worse, I could not get my mother out of my mind. I was sure this woman with Marlon was loose, and I couldn't help imagining Mom walking through the restaurant door, seeing her, and telling me, “I don't think you should be having dinner with someone like that!” Nor would she have approved when, on the way out of the restaurant, Marlon gave me a little pat on the behind. I slapped his face and told him off. My mother had spoken through me!

It was not something I would have shared with her, though. We didn't discuss those sorts of things. Nor did I let her know how ill at ease I was seeing her enjoying being away from home for so long. Long before the posses of rappers and HBO's
Entourage,
she was playing the game. For many weeks, she and her friend, my aunt Babe, were pretty much on their own in my hotel. Eventually, they made some friends—my manager, for one, and others—who would take them to dinner.

My whole life, people who met her were always charmed.

“We love your mother,” they'd tell me.

“That's because she isn't your mother,” I'd think to myself.

As weeks turned to months on that shoot, I grew more impatient with her. I had to live on a daily basis with the hole she was creating in our family. At some point, I must have fig
ured out that she was avoiding marital problems with my father. She was being independent in some convoluted way, and even trying to be worldly by eschewing domestic life. If only I had spoken up to her about how neglectful she was to my father and sister, who was only five at the time. But what would I have said?

Mom, we need to talk. This isn't just a weekend in the Catskills. You've been away from your home for a very long time. I love you dearly, and you know how grateful I am for your support. I also know you're having a fabulous time out here, and that you're pleased to see how well things have turned out for me. But, Mom, you really need to go home now. I'm old enough to handle things. The only big problem now is you.

Of course I never would have said anything like that. Propriety, as always, got in the way. It always did in my family. Neither of my parents ever spoke about what they were really feeling. My father, an attractive man with every temptation back home, always saw my mother as the great love of his life. He never told her that. And clearly she had issues with sex and sexuality, many of which she managed to pass on to me. How else to explain all the failed marriages and engagements I racked up in years to come? Perhaps my parents had become bored with each other, and had no idea how to have the kind of conversation that might help remedy their sex life. It was, after all, still the 1950s. They didn't read
The Kinsey Report
. What was to be said? And a proud man like my father, who was crippled by his own dignity, was not going to be able to beg his beloved wife to come home. If he did suggest it discreetly, she didn't listen.

It upset me. But it took decades before I could voice my feelings to her.

 

In the early 1980s, my father finally left my mother, and she fell apart completely. Once again, I heard the news from a family friend. She wasn't sleeping. She wasn't bathing or taking care of herself at all. I was doing two shows a night in Vegas at the time (this was before I received the call for
Dynasty
). I simply could not walk out of my contract to go comfort her, and my little sister, Lydia, in boarding school at the time, was useless to her in such situations. So I called my mother and invited her to stay with me. I didn't want her around while I was working. But I also didn't want her anyplace else.

“Diahann has sent for me,” she said to my father. Those were always the magic words. “Diahann has sent for me!” She arrived in Las Vegas, looking composed and attractive. Back in the lotusland of an overpriced hotel, her misery subsided.

Vegas, to my mother, was as good as a sanitarium, with the lulling sound of slot machines and all that eating.

Indeed, over the years, she had become overweight. It was something my father, who ate carefully and exercised all his life, had warned her about. She took care about her dress and carried herself with grace, but weight gain was one of many things in the marriage that she had taken for granted. At any rate, I saw from the moment she arrived that she'd be lifted by her visit. And, as usual, we did not discuss the elephant in the
room, the separation. “I'm happy you're here, Mom,” I said as she quietly unpacked in her suite.

“Yes; me, too,” she said.

“How was the flight?”

“Oh, fine, it was just fine,” she said.

This was about all we were capable of saying at that moment. Perhaps I told her I was sorry she was having a hard time and that soon we might want to talk about her plans. But we never had the discussion we should have had about what had happened to her marriage.

The only thing she was able to express was that my father was the one who had done wrong, not her. She claimed to have been mistreated. Even then I knew that this wasn't completely true, and I should have quietly said so. But again, I just didn't know how.

Well, I was a bit busy, with two shows a night for hundreds of people. One of the showstoppers I was doing at the time was “Going Out of My Head.” And that kind of summed up my situation. My third marriage had only recently combusted (more on that later), my daughter was estranged from me because she thought I cared more about my career than her (more on that later, too!). Meanwhile, I was completely unsure as to where my career was going, post-
Julia,
but it wasn't looking good. And now here was my mother, devastated to be separated from her husband of thirty-seven years, and right back in the middle of my life, which she had clearly always preferred to her own.

I had a large staff at the time, managers, musicians, personal assistants, and they all adored her and treated her like a
queen while I worked like a dog. When the engagement ended, I invited her to live with me in Beverly Hills.

Thus began the last act of my mother's life, a new beginning for us in Los Angeles, a chance to finally have the conversations I had buried for so many years.

In fact, there was nobody whom I learned to speak more freely with than my mother in her last years. That's because I believed in her. Maybe other daughters would have left her to her own ideas. I could not, especially when it came to what she would say about my father. Because he was the one who left the marriage to later remarry, she had convinced herself that she was the one who had been wronged. She played the martyr very well. And she often said disparaging things about my father to my daughter. One night, a few years after my parents' divorce, I was having lunch at my mother's place in the Valley in Sherman Oaks. We bought that house and I hired my decorator to gut and reconfigure it for her needs. She adored it, a sweet little ranch house with lovely landscaping, perfect for lunch with her church-lady friends.

We were in her sunny kitchen at the breakfast nook, and she was telling me she had spoken to some friends in New York who told her my father had remarried. And I don't know where she got this particular piece of information, but she decided to share with me that this woman and my father were having oral sex. She was disgusted at the idea of a woman who would do such a thing and felt my father was sinning horribly.

Before I could stop myself, I blurted out, “Well, thank God Dad has found a real sexual partner!” She squirmed in her seat.

“Diahann,” she said. “What in the world are you saying? I cannot believe you would condone such indecent and sinful behavior.”

“Mother, sexuality is a glorious part of the human experience, not something to be ashamed of. I know you have tried to teach me all my life that this creates sin, original sin. Do you understand how your kind of attitude has impacted my life? There is
pleasure
in sex, Mother. And you refused to teach me about it, which is enough to drive any man away.”

Perhaps it was a bit much, a bit theatrical, but at that point, I was looking at four failed marriages in my own life along with two broken engagements. So I was frustrated with both her and my own romantic history. She was in her eighties and I was in my sixties. Both of us were past our primes, yet the intensity of this conversation was the kind that belonged to youth, not old age.

Many of my friends who adored her for being my sweet little mother were angry with me when she told them about my blunt conversations. They were ready to kill me because they couldn't even say these kinds of things to themselves, much less to their mothers. But looking at it now, I'm glad I tried. We trusted each other.