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 admiring 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 fl
ustered 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.
“Of course you went home, didn’t you,” he said. “You never intended to leave your husband.” He couldn’t possibly be serious.
“How can you say that?” I told him. “I did what I was supposed to do.”
We agreed to get on with things, this time for real. So I went back to the Waldorf for a few days, but Sidney did not come. Again, I went home to Monte, humiliated and devastated. My mother was shocked when I told her my marriage was in trouble. But both she and Monte’s sister felt that a baby would be the answer to this problem, that it would bring me down to earth and stabilize the marriage.
And that’s what happened. Monte was wonderful during the pregnancy. So was everyone else, including Marilyn Monroe. When I was performing at a posh club in Los Angeles called Mocambo, I sat down with her and a movie executive named Max Youngstein after a show. Marilyn, who wanted a baby so badly, looked at me and put her hand on my belly. “You must be so happy,” she said with a sigh. I was, and Monte was ecstatic the day I put his hand on my stomach and he felt the baby kick for the first time. But I also knew we weren’t out of trouble. I hadn’t spoken to Sidney for months. But one day when I was close to giving birth, I bumped into him on Fifty-seventh Street.
“You were never supposed to have anyone’s child but mine,” he said.
He walked away before I could even say, “Good line, Sidney!”
The birth of my daughter, in 1961, was not easy, but when she was finally out, I was ecstatic to be a mother. We were all ecstatic. But I also knew deep down that nothing had changed for me and my feelings about my marriage. I was standing in the hospital when I told my mother, “I’m going to leave Monte.”
“Oh no, I thought that was over,” she said.
“I love my baby and I care about Monte, but I can’t stay with him,” I said.
“Are you leaving because of Sidney?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I have to move on.”
We didn’t separate immediately. For a while, things stayed the same. I went back to singing. My engagement at the Plaza continued to make me happy, as did fussing over my infant. The only problem I ever had at the Plaza was the time that management told me they didn’t think I should be singing a song by Oscar Brown Jr. called “Brown Baby.” Two executives reported to me that some people in the audience found the lyrics offensive.
Brown baby, as you grow up,
I want you to drink from the plenty cup…
It was a lovely lullaby to sing to a child about living with a head held high in a better world. I told the executives that I sang this song for my baby daughter. “This is not an offensive lyric, it’s a dream for my child,” I said. I was careful not to embarrass them. But I said, “We can’t let audiences dictate what I’m going to sing.” And I prevailed. It was another instance of my ability to keep control of any situation involving anything other than love and men. I took my singing very seriously, and would not have it compromised. Singing always got me through my life, and it always would.
Suzanne was four months old when I received a screenplay. It was for Paris Blues, a kind of double romance about two expatriate musicians and a couple of vacationing teachers from the United States. I wanted to do it. It had a social awareness that was very compelling and it showed two sophisticated black characters that would be just the thing to move the national conversation along. I got the part, and ended up playing Joanne Woodward’s sidekick. Guess who played Paul Newman’s? Sidney. I thought it would be fine. I’d grown up and had a baby, and Sidney had a new one, too.
Monte didn’t want me to do the film and be in Paris with Sidney, but he also knew that roles like this didn’t come along often. The baby, at four months, was too young to travel. I left her with him and flew to France, my mind reeling all the while. When I got there, I calmed down. It was so wonderful to watch Joanne Woodward at work. Seeing the rushes of one of her scenes, I heard Marty Ritt, the director, remark about the wonderful things she could do in front of a camera. He was right. I watched how she could just stand still and conjure exactly what it took to make a scene work. I was studying diligently at the Actors Studio in those years (and Marlon Brando had sent me boxes of books on the craft of acting) and I had developed as an actress. Watching Joanne deepened my conviction, and I carried some of my new confidence to my scenes with Sidney. I think he sensed I was growing as an artist and growing up as a woman.
But I was not grown up enough to know how to control myself. And neither was he. One night we decided to get it out of the way and go ahead and finally sleep together. I was petrified and it was a total disaster. “What is the matter with you?” he asked.
“I don’t know. But being with you like this makes me feel like trash,” I replied.
“You want too much,” he told me.
Perhaps. But after that I did my best to not wait around for my phone to ring. One night, Duke Ellington, who was working on the music for the film, took me out and fed me caviar. He treated me beautifully, and it’s exactly what I needed at that moment. He must have seen that I was missing something in my life. Maybe it would change when Monte and my parents came over from New York with the baby at the end of filming. I was desperate to have little Suzanne with me. When she arrived in my mother’s arms at Orly Airport, I could barely control my hysteria. I was still so young. Young enough, actually, to have originally named my child Ottille, based on the character I played in House of Flowers. Does that give you some insight into my immature, narcissistic little mind? I may have done things wrong raising my daughter, but at least I knew enough to change her name to something far more reasonable a few years later. Ottille. Oy! What was I thinking? At any rate, I was thrilled to finish the movie with her nearby. It was her first road trip with me. My family was so happy to be in Paris. But even as my mother ran around in a giddy state, preparing for festive holidays, Mont
e and I remained estranged. Meanwhile, Sidney and I met in secret and took long walks in the cold damp Paris nights, not unlike the ones we took in the movie along the Seine, very glum and noir. We decided that something really had to be done and came up with a plan.
After Paris, we would send our families home and then call them from Sweden (who knows why—maybe because it’s such a progressive country) with our news. Guess what? It never happened. Sidney got called in at the last minute to be part of the Kennedy inauguration gala. He’d have to rush home right away. So there was to be no divorce announcement, and no further plans. I ended up flying home alone.
Months later, he met with Monte and me after one of my shows in New York.
“I’m in love with your wife,” Sidney told him. “It’s been going on for years. Perhaps we should bring this to a head now so we can all rebuild our lives. I’ve talked to my wife and we’re getting a divorce. I think it would be better for everyone if you and Diahann did the same.” Monte looked stricken, but said, “Well, if that’s what Diahann wants, I won’t stand in her way.” So we finally went and got our divorce. It was amicable. I wanted him to be a part of Suzanne’s life and I was still fond of him.
The Legs Are the Last to Go Page 10