“She goes mad and shoots a man eight times a week,” I’d say.
I was only half joking.
Diahann Carroll and mother, Mabel Johnson, at the Alzheimer’s Disease Research and Patient Care Fundraising Gala, Beverly Hills, March 2, 1985. (Photograph by Ron Galella/WireImage)
TWO
Queen Mother
SO HOW DOES A GIRL FROM HARLEM GROW UP TO BE a doyenne of stage, screen, and TV, with a penchant for couture, coiffure, Rolls-Royces, and the great composers of her time? In the tradition of so many memoirs, you can blame it all on my mother. She is the woman who made it her business to nurture me so completely as a child that I felt beautiful and special from the start. She lived a long life. When she died in 1999, I was already in my sixties, a senior citizen myself. The day of her passing, I didn’t pause for even a moment to reflect on how important she’d been to me. I didn’t cry, either. I simply flew into combat mode, the way I do when I’m pulling one of my shows together for the road, and I started making the funeral arrangements. I told the young woman at the funeral parlor that I would bring in all my mother’s personal makeup, everything she had, “And I want you to make her look like a movie star.” She never liked having gray hair, but she had no choice but to let it go gray in her last year. So I had it dyed black for the funeral—just the way she liked it. The makeup job was subtle. The color of her outfit was not. I put her in a military red Diahann Carroll suit, a color she always loved in her favorite designer label.
I guess I wasn’t, at that moment, able to accept the loss of someone who had always been such a presence in my life. And I wasn’t ready to accept the fact that we had all kinds of issues that remained unresolved right to the end. Or perhaps I should say I had all these issues with her that I’d never resolved for myself. It’s strange. I am a woman known in my profession for having a level head. To survive in show business, especially when race is part of the scenario, it helps to keep calm. But just thinking about my mother, all these years after she’s gone, still makes me feel flustered, like a child who cannot figure out how to get her point across to the most important person in her life.
“Mom!” I hear myself saying over and over. “You don’t understand!”
Are there any more familiar words between mothers and daughters?
Why did I need to harangue her so much, to lecture her about things her old-fashioned soul didn’t want to accept? Did I have to hold her responsible for so many of my failings as a woman and a wife? Was it necessary to shake her up with every little thing I’d learned about myself in psychotherapy? And could I not have allowed her a few more indulgences in the accessories department? Maybe I didn’t need to tease her quite so much about her big earrings. She was a simple, polite, churchgoing lady who liked to do things properly. Okay, well, maybe not that properly, when the truth came out. But I didn’t discover all that about her until much later in our lives. My mother!
She did look fabulous in her casket. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Some people might say I’m too image-conscious. They don’t think that walking around in beaded dresses and heels adds up to a meaningful life. I don’t do that every day. But I do it more than your average senior citizen. What can I say? It pleases me to know I’ve been on the International Best Dressed list twice in my life. I want to make the best entrance I possibly can. Just as I select songs for my cabaret performances carefully, I select wardrobe with great attention to detail. Materialistic? Of course it is. I’m nothing if not materialistic, and have been since I was young. My idea of a good time is shopping, and nobody is going to make me feel guilty about it. And I don’t care what today’s actresses tell you about having their best times in jeans and T-shirts, they are as image-conscious as those of us who grew up with a more studied idea of style.
Blame it on the movies, if you like. I grew up watching MGM musicals, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Lena Horne, all women who were concerned with looking smashing, not natural. Then there was the woman who schooled me early on in the ways of style—my mother. She was a high-school-educated woman with a highly developed sense of dignity, and she was on a mission to make me aware of how good I looked.
My confidence, my drive, and care about my personal style all come from her.
We didn’t have much money, but, oh, did we have style!
My parents were practically children themselves when they met in 1931 at a carnival on Long Island. My father had just come up to New York from Aiken, South Carolina. My mother was just up from Bladenboro, North Carolina, and had been looking for work, with the encouragement of her own hardworking mother, while on her summer vacation. She was twenty-one, he was twenty, and working as a lithographic printer as well as a caddie on Long Island golf courses. He did not have anything beyond an elementary school education, and she only got as far as high school. But they had charming smiles, social grace, a relentless urge to escape the South and improve their lives, and, well, to be frank, a healthy attraction to the opposite sex. They liked each other right away. “That’s the man I’m going to marry,” my mother told a cousin when she first saw my father.
Mabel Faulk, my mother, was striking. She had great cheekbones, her mother’s almond-toned skin, and smoky, intriguing eyes. Her features were well proportioned and she had a shape that was coveted at the time—ample breasts, small waist, and full hips. She was never thin, but always voluptuous, with the most lovely legs. She wore shorts until she was eighty-two years old, bless her, and her hair was always thick and dark. She knew she was attractive and she worked it. Her glance was more solicitous than seductive. At any rate, men always looked.
My father, John Johnson, was always a looker. He was a man’s man—tall and solid, and powerful in stature, with warm amber skin, a strong nose and mouth, and piercing, animated eyes. He was never much of a talker. A black boy raised in the South by a quick-tempered father learns how to keep his mouth shut. A black boy who was once almost set on fire by racists in his hometown, learning that he cannot find relief in justice by telling anyone the truth about something so awful, keeps his anger locked inside, and adapts to a world in which to get along, you make yourself as agreeable as possible. At any rate, he was always a charmer, and the ladies always responded.
Well, how do you resist a man in houndstooth pants, a crisp white shirt, and spit-shined wingtip shoes? Even at ninety-six, he was a dignified flirt.
He wasn’t looking to settle down when he met my mother but “she was nice, real nice,” he liked to say about her with the same sly smile that often appeared when he remembered her. He was just getting used to being on his own, breathing easy, for once in his life, out from under the punitive hand of his father. He and my mother married in 1933, in a small ceremony at Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church. The highly influential Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr., whose son became the powerful congressman years later, officiated. The newlywed Mr. and Mrs. Johnson were drawn to Harlem, in the heyday of its renaissance. It lured so many young blacks eager to join its rich and vibrant culture. “Back then, it was the only place to be,” my father told me.
John found a small apartment for himself and his new bride on West 151st Street, not too far from the storied 409 Edgecombe Avenue, where W. E. B. DuBois and Thurgood Marshall were among the famous tenants. Because my father’s salary, as a printer and caddie, was not enough for two, my mother had to find work doing housework. My father couldn’t stand the idea of his wife having to work. It was a symbol of his inability to support his family. To him, a man wasn’t a man unless he could do that. By his careful calculations, he needed to look for another job.
A year and a half into the marriage, in 1935, I came along. Ta-da. Carol Diann Johnson, a surprise baby. With my arrival, John’s search for a better job became urgent. In their brief time together, John had seen Mabel’s independence and fiery spirit. When her labor started after an argument, Mabel, in a fit of anger and spite, drove herself to a Bronx hospital to have me. Eventually, John got the ca
ll at work, and he had to race uptown to find his wife and greet me properly. My parents really were children in so many ways. Not that I’m one to talk, given my naive ways around men my whole life. But my parents’ immaturity eventually did make marriage difficult, especially in later years. Yet they were such a wonderful team, too, from early on.
They were strivers, up-and-comers. My father had set his sights on a better job than working at a printing shop, and wanted to work for the city’s subway system, one of the few places a black man could find decent pay, security, and benefits. My mother helped him study for the transit test he had to take. I remember when I was about five, watching them at our kitchen table, the boisterous life of the Harlem streets right outside our window, as they pored over papers with the quiet diligence of scholars. Dad passed the test, and landed a job with benefits, his first, making change in token booths. It was 1940. At the time, a ride cost five cents.
So now my parents, the Johnsons, were moving up in the world. They had a strong desire to live and socialize among the African-American upper crust, who for the most part had parlayed their lighter skin and straighter hair into better opportunities. But unfortunately, in the rarefied world of exclusive black social clubs like The Jack and Jill and The Links, where looks could influence social standing, John and Mabel Johnson were missing the key attribute that would have unlocked all the doors for them. Yes, my mother was light-skinned, and my father could have made it through the “paper-bag test,” meaning you could be no darker in skin color than a paper bag, but they did not have that all-essential college education to prove their worth. Without that, they were left on the outside of the Harlem society they craved to join. But their alienation made them determined to see that their own children would not face those kind of barriers and limitations.
They did only one thing in my entire childhood that made me feel unloved. When I was still a toddler, they left me with my mother’s sister in North Carolina. To the sound of tree frogs in the hot and humid evening, my mother tucked me in and kissed me good night, and the next morning she was gone. Gone! She and my father had decided that they could not afford to be proper parents and work to earn enough to support us decently. So one morning, with honeybees and crickets now buzzing outside the window of a house with no plumbing or electricity, I awoke to find no mother. My aunt scrubbed me in a big tin washtub. I was utterly bewildered. Why would my mother leave me without even telling me why? Was I too young to understand without flying into a tantrum that would tear at her heart so it would have made it impossible for her to leave me? She and my father knew what they had to do to get ahead. But that one year, without the security of my own parents, has stayed with me all these years. I hated living in my aunt’s house. I missed the doting of my parents, and I was terrified of the outhouse, where I had seen snakes, spiders, and lizards. And I was so bewildered. Nobody would answer my questions, “Where is my mother? Why did she leave me here?”
How could I possibly understand that the decision to leave me with this aunt was inspired by a need to secure a better future for me? My father had crunched the numbers. Though he had little book learning, he always had a very astute business mind. He knew if he and my mother could be free for one year of the demands of parenthood, they could get ahead financially. So they chose a hard path for a year to build us a better life. In their year of working without me around, they were able to move to a larger apartment, in which they occupied two rooms and rented out the others.
I returned to it one day with them from the South, and said very little. A few years later, their work ethic would become my own work ethic, but at the time, their decision only caused me misery. We never talked about that lost year—my parents simply didn’t discuss difficult and disturbing incidents. But I was scarred by it, and I was left with such a deep feeling of abandonment that I took it with me for years, all the way into middle age and beyond. And I still believe that that year—and the fear I subsequently had of being left behind—caused me to stick with men who were absolutely wrong for me later in my life. I also carried with me a feeling that I had done something wrong to deserve such treatment from people I loved so very much.
But that day when my parents finally brought me back to New York, I will say this: a far more comfortable life was beginning for all of us in every way.
My parents were all about moving up. But stylish as Harlem was in those years, it was still a ghetto. So early on, my father talked of moving to the suburbs—and Mother urged him along with the idea. He once interrupted a game of stickball outside our home to have the children who were playing take their coats off his car—he prided himself on having a clean car—and when he returned he found his windshield broken. It only reinforced his dream of having a nice lawn on which his little girl could play without worry, and a garage to keep his Chrysler safe from stickball players. It took a long time to move. But he was doing well. By the time I was in kindergarten, he had saved enough to purchase a brownstone as a rental property. So he became a landlord.
If you tried to tell me we lived in a rough part of town or that we were low on the social totem pole, I would not have believed you. To me, my parents were a king and queen, and I was their princess, a Harlem princess. Though my father rarely said very much, they adored me and surrounded me with everything, from toys and clothes to hugs at night, that made me feel loved and secure, and on a pedestal all my own.
I took my role in my elementary school production of Pinocchio very seriously, and so did my mother. “All right, let’s study your lines now,” she’d tell me. We’d rehearse together. “Did you like that, Mommy?” I’d say, working until my bedtime. I was relentless in my determination to have every little line and every little action perfected, and she was with me every step of the way, as much a coach as an accomplice. “Should I say it like this or that? Faster or slower? High or low?” For weeks, I couldn’t talk about anything but that elementary school play. My mother never tired of it.
And she took my costume as seriously as any mother possibly could. I was only seven years old, and it was only made of crepe paper, but you’d have thought it was wardrobe for a queen the way she fussed over it. “How should I wear this, Mommy? What about the hat?” I played Jiminy Cricket, the little voice of conscience. It was a good role for me, since my parents had been vigilant in teaching me about propriety at every level. The girl who was Carol Diann was not allowed to chew gum or use rough language or hang around on the street after school with other girls on our Harlem block. I had to practice piano, not one hour, but two, every day. “All respectable young people know how to play the piano,” my mother would say as I’d sit down and tap the keys on the spinnet in our living room. “Does that make you not respectable?” I always wanted to ask her. Just outside the window, kids were playing, hanging around. I never cared about missing out on that. I had my music, a civilizing sound in a scrappy neighborhood.
I had to devote all my extra time to my studies and to rehearsals for the Tiny Tots choir at the Abyssinian Baptist Church. Our church was the most important institution in Harlem, overseen by Adam Clayton Powell Sr., and a place where you dressed to the nines every Sunday. My father was a deacon. I was always dressed better than any other child, and I was a natural talent, never shy or apprehensive in front of the congregation. I loved being the soloist, and to this day I remember stepping out of the line of other little singers in our black-and-white robes, and looking way down beyond the pulpit to my audience, opening my mouth, and with only a little fear, opening it to sing “Balm in Gilead” and “No Hiding Place Down There.” The chorus behind me backed me up in a way that felt so empowering. The congregation was smiling in the brightly lit tabernacle, with friendly black faces all around and above me in the balconies, as they fanned themselves in the heat. Afterward, when I took off my robe to go home, or perhaps to a carefully prepared picnic at Edgecombe Park, I looked regal. My mother saw to that. It was always her goal to make me look as clean and pretty as possible.
&n
bsp; For piano recitals, she would seize the chance to be my stylist and fixate on putting me in the loveliest dress—organza or cotton with crinolines underneath. Sometimes I’d go with her to buy fabrics at the open market under the bridge of the L train on Park Avenue. “Oh no, no, no, no,” she’d say as she tested how quickly a fabric would wrinkle in her hands. If it stayed wrinkled, no matter how pretty, and how much I wanted her to have it made into a dress for me, she’d put it down. Then she’d pick up another fabric and tug at it as the subway rumbled on the tracks above us. It was hot, and she still had to prepare dinner thirty blocks away. But there was no deterring her. “No, not this one, either,” she’d say as she’d put down the fabric and move on. It always took a long time to find just the right thing, but even when I was hungry or tired on our shopping expeditions, I was never impatient. I marveled at my mother’s resolve, the fact that she knew so much about fabrics, and knew exactly what she’d have the seamstress do with it.
“Gathered here, and with a sash to tie in a bow in the back,” she’d say. “We need a Peter Pan collar and pleats down the front, but not too many.” Her voice was lusty, her accent more rural Southern than Harlem. At times, she seemed like Sophia Loren.
Sometimes she’d take me to Macy’s, and it felt like I was seeing the world with her as my tour guide. When she’d put a yellow bow in my hair, she’d fuss with it until it was just so. “Here, not there,” she’d say as her strong fingers fluttered over my head like bees pollinating a flower. “Just off to the side so it doesn’t distract too much from your eyes.”
She was of the generation that had just come North from the South. And they were obsessed with looking clean and attractively dressed because we lived in a country that promoted the idea that blacks were neither. If you talk about racism, it all began to gel for me when I realized why my mother was so obsessed with cleanliness. Well, she always knew what she wanted. I guess she was like her mother in that way. My grandmother Rebecca was quite sharp, a formidable person. She was also incredibly proper, a hardworking country woman who ran a cotton and tobacco farm. She saw to it that my mother was educated, the first girl in her North Carolina town to be sent off to high school the next town over—a very big deal in the early twentieth century. I don’t think there were many women who would actually run their own businesses at the time, and certainly not many black women. I still remember when I’d stay with her as an older child during my summer vacations, and going to town and observing how she conducted herself. The South was not like the North in the 1940s. When we went shopping, I remember hating the way white men did business with my grandmother, when she was selling them hogs or chickens. Instead of Rebecca, they called her Becky, and spoke to her as if she was a child. But she would not respond, she just stood her ground until her business was done. I learned something from her quiet dignity in the presence of racism. “Thank you, Mr. Smith,” she’d say, without any tone of annoyance in her voice. “I’ll see you next week.” It was difficult to watch, in one way, but impressive in another. Studied composure helped her get along in her world. It wasn’t easy being a woman running a farm. But my grandfather, who died when he stepped on an electrical wire, had left her his business and she had to run it with an iron hand, employing local blacks and treating them no better or worse than her white counterparts did. She would have them picked up for work each day in a mule-drawn wagon, rather than a truck. That’s how long ago it was. And when her workers lined up to get their pay at the end of the day, they had their cotton bags full on their shoulders, and she weighed them very carefully to determine exactly what they were to be paid. Once she decided, there was no arguing with Miz Rebecca, as they called her. She was a fair boss, but tough. And she would not allow me in the fields to work, absolutely not.
The Legs Are the Last to Go Page 4