The Legs Are the Last to Go

by Diahann Carroll

  As I struggled, I screamed, “Please get out! This is exactly why I’m getting the hell out of here! I think your inviting a married woman to a dinner when your wife isn’t present is not only impolite, but it’s wrong.”

  That’s when he told me, “Listen, Vic knows all about this.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “He’s knows all about this, so you don’t have to worry.”

  It was hard to take in exactly what he was implying—I didn’t actually think it was possible that my husband knew this would be happening. I mean how could any husband understand behavior so blatantly inappropriate—that a business associate would treat his wife in such an aggressive and shameless manner. But in spite of my continuing to struggle with him, he remained in the car—trying to impose his will upon me. He even smiled and told me how he’d always liked my looks. It was so insulting and embarrassing. I told him, “Get out now,” and tried to push him out of the car, and he held on to my arm and laughed. That’s when I scratched his face. I wanted to leave a mark on it that he would have to explain to his wife.

  Vic was back from his trip, as I recall, when I got home. I walked into the house feeling dead because I was afraid to feel anything. I told Vic I had gone to dinner, and his friend had not brought his wife, and I didn’t understand why that happened.

  Vic’s response was strangely flat and devoid of emotion.

  “You should not have gone,” he said. “Why did you go?”

  “Because you told me to go.”

  “You didn’t have to go, and when you got there, why didn’t you leave?”

  “But I did leave almost immediately.”

  He just shrugged and said, “Well, the only thing I can think is that you shouldn’t have gone.”

  This wasn’t the kind of reaction I expected from Vic. I had expected a completely outraged response. He was an old-fashioned husband in so many ways. Yet he wasn’t understanding of my anger and confusion. It seemed very strange. So there was this silence. It was the kind of silence you have when ugly things are about to be said, and once they are, everything will change. So we didn’t discuss it further. I had a drink or two and we quietly went to bed.

  But that night I was so confused I could barely sleep.

  A few weeks later, Vic and I were going to a country club for dinner and I told him I hoped we wouldn’t be seated with the financial adviser and his wife. Vic told me I was a pain in the neck, but called ahead to arrange that we be seated at another table with our guests. And when we arrived at the dinner, the host met us and took me aside. He said, “I understand you did not want to sit at that man’s table and I’m very sorry about that. But you are not the first woman in this club who has had to put up with that. And we really are going to have to do something about it.” I told him to speak to Vic if he wished, but that’s all I would have to do with it and I wouldn’t say anything to anyone about it. At the end of dinner, the financial adviser approached with his wife to say hello. I did not see the scratches I had left on his face. But I knew from the look on the face of his wife that she knew something had happened. She couldn’t look at me at all.

  I’ve since observed that what felt like an isolated, and certainly isolating, event is not so singular in the business. We all know about the “casting couch” and the situations some women find themselves in when trying to break in. But little is said about what happens on the other end of the spectrum—once a woman has made it. The hustling kind of men, and there are many who succeed in Los Angeles, cannot help but see beautiful women as prey, women as commodities. They feed off of a woman’s success. The money is easy and the lifestyle can seem fairy-tale-like; it’s certainly more fun than a nine-to-five job for a man who has not found the kind of nine-to-five career that inspires him. But most women in my field cannot bring themselves to talk about it. I know women who’ve had to go through what I went through—and it’s still happening today. In fact, despite my many marriages, it surprises me that young women still come to ask me for advice about love and marriage. My advice, these days, is pretty simple. You can love ’em but you don’t have to marry them. After all, when and if it falls apart, the men almost always walk away without any repercussions.

  It’s a perspective I’ve acquired over time, but when that incident with Vic happened I didn’t see it in such terms. I only knew that something between the two of us had unraveled. But like I keep saying, I’m really very foolish around men, and if there was some discomfort, I’d have a drink and try to forget about it.

  But in some ways, I never forgot about it—to me it was tantamount to mental abuse by my husband. We had reached the lowest depth, one from which no marriage survives intact, because all trust and moral decency had been eliminated.

  Several years later, when I was learning that Sunset Boulevard was going to take me to Toronto for a year, and that Vic really didn’t want me to go, I found myself totally ignoring his wishes. My careerist mentality, the one that didn’t make it possible for me to just say “okay, dear” started to bubble up. I was torn, but not as torn as I might have been had he been a better husband. And if my view of him had changed forever—on account of the incident with the financial adviser—Vic’s view of me changed forever when I told him I would not turn down a year’s contract to work in .

  It was too much for his macho mind to handle. What would he tell his Palm Springs friends when they asked, “Where is your wife?”

  “Diahann’s on the road, doing Sunset?”

  It was self-centered of me to assume everyone was happy for me. But it was a part I’d been wanting to play for a long time, and it was coming at a time when I never thought anything like it would come to me again. As importantly, it would be another historic first—I’d be the first black actress to play the role. Okay, I’d already played a black bitch on Dynasty, but this was a deluded bitch of the silver screen in a spectacular production. The chance to do it was an enormous gift. But to Vic, it was a problem. I remember friends telling me to be careful. He was the kind of man who did not want to hear his wife get more applause than he did, ever, and I always had to be aware of that.

  Perhaps that’s why he didn’t come to see me in Toronto very often. But one time, one of his good friends actually suggested that the billboards of me that were all over the city, on tops of buildings and sides of buses, be taken down before he showed up. That way when he arrived, he wouldn’t see pictures of me everywhere.

  It made no difference that this was not the Broadway, Los Angeles, or London production. He didn’t want to see that his wife had become the Queen of Toronto.

  What could make a man so unsupportive? Well, I’ve never been a popular Italian male singer. But I do know it’s a heavy load, a responsibility to carry on one’s shoulders because your musicality and masculinity and everything else about the way you carry yourself is involved in your work, even more than it is for a woman who wears tight dresses and high heels. I’d seen Vic’s fans when I’d been on tour with him. Their devotion meant something to him. I’ll never forget the time I was performing with him (once again, this was in Vegas) and I’d heard that one of his most devoted fans, let’s call her Gloria, was in the audience. She had sent a note or something. Now, I’d heard about Gloria since I met Vic. She was at almost every show, but he only met her once, years ago, and since then she had always kept herself hidden from him a few rows back. One night the boys in the band were going on as they always did about Gloria being out there. I said, “Am I ever going to meet her? She’s like some kind of mysterious legend.” I went onstage to do my songs before Vic, and in the middle of my act, I said, “Stop the music! Ladies and gentlemen, we are honored to have a wonderful woman in the audience tonight who has been a fan of my husband’s for twenty-five years. She is so loyal and so kind, and I think we should have her stand up so we can thank her for being that kind of fan! I want you to know how much I appreciate it, Gloria, and Vic does, too. Would you please stand up?”

 
; And a spotlight turned to the audience and this woman stood up who was huge. Absolutely huge. I think the image Vic had in his mind all those years was that this devoted fan was still the cute, svelte young thing he’d met twenty-five years earlier. I know I had had the impression she would look like Jane Powell. Anyway, I didn’t miss a beat. When Gloria stood up in all her glory, I walked off the stage to shake her hand and thank her.

  But I do think I had burst a little bubble that night. Cavalier as show-business men of his generation could be, they really did have thin skin and big egos, and to find out that his biggest fan was literally his biggest fan must have been a little hard for Vic to take. I can still remember being on Dean Martin’s show in 1965 with a group of Vic’s peers. I was in a ball gown with hair reaching toward heaven, and they were all in tuxedos, holding cocktails and cigarettes, right on the air, mind you. Old times! Who was on? Dean, Frank Sinatra, Joey Bishop, Danny Thomas, yours truly, and about six cocktail waitresses being ogled and teased. Clearly, these men felt it was their obligation to joke about women as second-class citizens. But as I grew to know them, I figured out how smart they were, and how decent they were. They were just putting on an act. So when they’d pat my rear, I’d just pat theirs right back. They really were a bunch of adorable boys, who only pretended to be relaxed, when they were actually very focused and hardworking. We were like pals as we went around from one television variety show to the next.

  The only time there was any tension with them was when we were all taping a Frank Sinatra special. Frank had just received word that Mia Farrow would not be returning home to him because she had been offered a role in the film Rosemary’s Baby. We stopped shooting the show then and there, and a bunch of limos quickly appeared in front of the studio and took us all to dinner in a restaurant that had been closed for us in Century City. Frank looked ready to kill. His wife was choosing a job over him?

  I suppose some of that same thing was happening between Vic and me in the 1980s. And now that I think of it, it’s also likely that this friend who suggested I have my billboards removed from all over Toronto had been privy to Vic’s reaction from a previous visit.

  “I really don’t think I can get them to take any billboards down,” I told his friend.

  I mean, can you imagine my telling the producer to do less advertising? I can’t say that being alone in Toronto for that year made me realize how unsupportive Vic was. All I know is that I wish we had both been able to speak our minds. He could have told me directly to come home and I could have told him that I could not leave the most important job of my senior years. Then we could have had it out in a way that at least would allow some real communication between us. Granted, I was not happy at home—however, without realizing it, I re-created the exact pattern of departure from my marriage that my mother had created in her life.

  Hard as it was to believe, Vic even started calling my drama coach after seeing my performance. He asked her, “Aren’t you afraid of Diahann doing that role?” My drama coach, a very feisty lady, asked him, “What are you talking about?”

  He told her he thought it would give me thoughts of committing suicide.

  She told him, “Hell no! Diahann would never do that!”

  I thought it was interesting of him to think that. My character doesn’t kill herself, she kills a man who disappoints her, and at that time, I was more disappointed with Vic than with myself. When I’d come to New York from Toronto on the nights when the show was dark, I’d go to hear him singing at a midtown club where he was working. And I could not help but notice a little lady, who looked to be older than Vic, who had invited twenty guests to his show every night before taking them all to dinner in expensive restaurants. At first I did not take her seriously. But I could see she knew what he lived for—to be treated royally. It was enough that I helped him buy his Palm Springs house. Beyond that, I just wasn’t comfortable supporting a man who was able to work and support himself. I wanted to keep things evenly split financially. But, as I’d learned, Vic was more ambitious about golf than about his career. And this little lady was, and still is, very rich, with several homes and her own plane. She knew what she wanted. Early on, she said to me, “I’ve been in love with him since I was fourteen years old, and I don’t know how you could stand to be away from him for so long.”

  I told her, “Well, at this point, it ain’t difficult.”

  One night she gave a small dinner party at her apartment. I was just back in New York after closing Sunset. When she was seating her guests, she said, “I want Vic to be at the head of my table!” I was shocked. We were still married. But I thought to myself that if she can be that rude, then she is probably very strong, and smart enough to know exactly how to make my husband very happy, and he’s going to fall for it completely because she is very rich.

  At the end of dinner, I told him I was going home alone.

  I walked into the same apartment on Riverside Drive that I had decorated so zealously for Sidney, the husband who never materialized to live there with me so many years before. I could not keep from looking back and feeling like an absolute failure. Sure, I had just triumphed in Toronto. But my marriages had been nothing but disastrous, and a successful marriage was still stuck in my head, my old-fashioned, proper-girl head, as the ultimate goal.

  Separation had become the only option. And I had some thinking to do. It took a long time, but little by little, over the course of months, I started to feel a change. I asked myself, “What are you going to do with yourself when you get up in the morning, Diahann? Is it possible to be comfortable putting your two feet soundly on the floor and saying, ‘I’m single and I’m happy’? Because, my dear, there won’t be any shoes under the bed other than your own! So why don’t you try something new, and try living in a different way and keep the damn shoes away from the bed and see how it feels?”

  And that’s exactly what I did. It was not easy at first. But then it got easier and more pleasant. I found the majority of my time was spent with more interesting people who stimulated me and made me laugh. And we would do the kinds of things I liked doing, cultural things rather than singularly sports-related things, traveling to stimulating places rather than purely relaxing ones. And when I was at a party or dinner, I could look across a room and recognize the kind of person I’d want to talk to, and I would be able to talk to him or her without the burden of having to answer to someone on my arm.

  There was no golf, and better yet, there was no jealousy or guilt or mind games.

  And I thought to myself, “How wonderful that I can finally enjoy being alone!”

  You know, ten years ago, I did not understand women who chose to be alone. But now, when I walk through my condo door after a lovely evening, it just feels marvelous. The other night I was coming back from an evening out, and as I was walking through my lobby—dressed to kill, I might add—a neighbor saw me and said, “Oh, don’t you look wonderful, Diahann! We should have taken you with us!”

  I didn’t know what to say. Was she suggesting that I would have been happier going out with her and her husband than alone at dinner with my friends? There’s an assumption in our society that a woman alone in a restaurant is lonely and that she needs a dinner partner, even if she has to rent one. I know women who do that.

  It is a wonderful feeling to know your life is full just as it is.

  That is not to say that I’m not open to relationships. I still have my beauty regimen before bed each night. I moisturize and brush my hair and enjoy my lovely lingerie.

  It has taken some time to get to this present state of mind.

  Some months after I left Vic with his lady in New York, I was back in Los Angeles, and I was still smarting from the loss of my marriage when I was sitting on the floor in the dark. I don’t know why I had even bothered calling to tell Vic at that moment that I had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. I had already stressed him out with complaints about my injured leg from a fall I’d taken in Sunset Boulevard. I was, I guess
, just a pain in the ass to him by that time. It just seemed that it was important health news to share with him, and I told him I didn’t want him reading about it in the papers first. I wanted him to know that this was happening to me and that it was not necessarily serious.

  His reply was shocking. “Oh, shit! What next, Diahann?” he said. Then he slammed down the phone. Wouldn’t that make your knees crumble and put you on the floor? I was alone. I had cancer and I was out of work.

  I think I knew that I’d eventually land on my feet.

  But that night I was flat out on my ass.

  Addressing the UNESCO World Summit Against Cancer. (© Diahann Carroll)

  FIVE

  Sickness and Health

  MALIBU WAS CALLING ME IN THE SPRING OF 1997. MY old friend Nigel (a charming actor whom I had met years ago through my mother) and I would go driving up the Pacific Coast Highway looking at summer rentals. I thought it would be a nice change to be by the ocean, find a place where Mom could visit with me and enjoy a vacation. There was one place that was just so airy, with a big open kitchen facing the ocean and a fireplace in the den, and I just imagined how relaxing it would be. She could be Malibu Mabel, I could let some clean sea air into my new life, and we could hold court on a balcony looking over the ocean.

  But that plan was not meant to be because shortly thereafter, I received the news that there was a spot on my mammogram. It was nothing I could see, even with the doctor pointing it out to me, but before I knew it, I was having a biopsy. The results came back immediately.

  “Good news and bad news,” said Dr. Barry Rosenblum, a very warm man and a good friend. “You do have cancer, but it is so early that the tumor is less than a centimeter in size, and we can be very happy about that.”

  I didn’t panic when I heard the news. I do remember thinking, “But I have always taken such good care of myself, exercised and eaten well!” It was as if I’d paid my union dues and was expecting a pass for the rest of my life. I mean what gives one cancer? Who knows? Thin, nonsmoking nutrition nuts get it. It seems to me that other than smoking and genetics, you can’t blame cancer on anything specific. It is too often blamed on stress. Stress! When I was a girl, we didn’t know the word stress. Life is always fraught and difficult, and if it isn’t, you aren’t really alive. So I didn’t look to blame my cancer on anything.