The Legs Are the Last to Go

by Diahann Carroll

  At the time, the show was being produced by Ed Sullivan’s son-in-law. So he came out and asked, “What’s the matter, Diahann?” I told him that the lyrics I had been singing were “Stuck in a rut going nowhere,” and the name of the song was “Hum Drum Blues.” I said that the song was about poverty and the ghetto and that twirling colorful umbrellas really made no sense. Now, I was still young at that time, and most assuredly I was not invited to have an opinion about such a gargantuan production number on such a gargantuan TV show. So my little question caused a big fuss. First the choreographer came out (I think it was Peter Gennaro) to deal with my question. Then my manager, Roy, and then half a dozen people were on that stage, all very agitated. Finally Ed Sullivan himself came onstage. He asked me what the trouble was.

  “I’m singing about something I think is politically important,” I told him. “And I don’t understand all the pink and yellow umbrellas. I just don’t get it.”

  And then Ed Sullivan, bless him, looked at the director and choreographer and the rest of this squad of creative individuals, all invested in creating the biggest spectacle they could, and he asked, “So what do the pink and yellow umbrellas represent?”

  Nobody had a good answer. So they toned it down. It was one of the first times in my career that I understood that bigger was not necessarily better.

  Bigger could actually be nothing.

  Another time I had to question spectacle was when I starred in a television special with Maurice Chevalier. Ours was the first collaboration between French and American television, and we were to sing songs about Broadway and Paris, a real hands-across-the-water effort. I looked au courant in my tasteful, slightly mod outfits and bobbed hair, and Maurice Chevalier—well, who wouldn’t adore the old man as he crooned?

  The only trouble was the director.

  He was some kind of avant-garde sensation and his goal was to create an Op-Art spectacle with his two stars and chorus. That’s how we ended up with Monsieur Chevalier singing “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries” while, for reasons I will never understand, dancers in leotards moved around him holding up giant lips and mustaches. I don’t remember anything I sang other than “I Love Paris.” But I do remember trying to get through a song set against a set that was a maze of mirrors, and having to stop at the end of every phrase. You can’t deliver any meaning to an audience if you can’t sing a song through to the end. This was supposed to be art. Instead, it was boring, pretentious, and big in every way except emotionally. At the end of each day of shooting, France’s most charming crooner and America’s darling new singing sensation left feeling uninspired.

  “Have a good evening, Monsieur Chevalier,” I said.

  “And the same to you,” he’d reply.

  Was I making the same mistake a few years later, with my act and its set—a towering construction made of Lucite? It looked dazzling on the Las Vegas stage on which I sang a song by a popular folksinger of the moment, Don McLean. The song was “Starry, Starry Night.” It was about Vincent van Gogh. So why not project his famous stars all over the set at ten times the size they actually were in the painting? Never mind that the song was a delicate wisp of a ballad about suicide and sadness. We had rear-projection lighting that, in tandem with my orchestra, gown, and, oh yes, my lovely voice, would thrill even the most bored audience.

  I had to do whatever I could to make an impact. By the 1970s, things had changed so much in my business that I was running in circles to keep up. Not only did I have to understand what Motown was about, I had to incorporate what Dionne Warwick was doing with Burt Bacharach’s songs. I’d buy albums and cassettes in stores (and, soon enough, CDs) and listen to hundreds of songs on my living-room floor, in search of the new material that would help get me up-to-date. I found it exhausting. I also found the idea of replacing strings with synthesizers (not just for economic reasons, but to have a more contemporary sound) loathsome. Still, I kept my big act going, like the Big Top, with my full squad of staff and musicians at my side. I could not give up big.

  Monte had told me years before that I should not be afraid of singing alone with a pianist, that I had the right voice and interpretive skills to pull off subtle and intimate. I didn’t listen. I didn’t have to. Eventually, though, things really started to dry up. The audiences in Vegas had changed. I remember doing one show in the early 1980s in Reno, in which I had to share the stage with an elephant.

  She was really the star, not me. Talk about the elephant in the room.

  I was being told to downsize everything—my act and my life—and I was ignoring it. Well, I managed to downsize my life sooner than my act. I got rid of the huge house, waterfall and billiards room included, and moved to a smaller house. Then, ten years later, when I started wondering who all these people were who were working at my smaller house—gardeners, housekeepers, cooks, and more—I decided to stop trying to pretend I was a billionaire and move to a condo. I even organized a sale to sell everything, and jumped in my car just as the first buyers were driving up. They bought things I never really needed in the first place. I couldn’t get over it. I was gleeful at the idea of sending all my stuff out into the world.

  It didn’t take long to understand that living in a condo and driving a sedan rather than a Rolls was liberating. Yes, some privacy is compromised in a high-rise. But maybe all that privacy, all that exclusivity, is just a little overrated. It’s nice to be greeted by neighbors in the lobby on a daily basis. It’s nice to have a home and a staff that doesn’t make you feel like you’re hemorrhaging every hard-earned penny. I was downsizing and I was growing up! I didn’t need all the accoutrements to show myself that I had a luxurious life.

  Still, when Michael Feinstein first invited me to perform in his small cabaret space, I turned him down cold. “I wouldn’t know what to do, Michael,” I said.

  “What do you mean, Diahann?” he asked.

  “What am I going to do without my orchestra?”

  “How many do you work with?”

  “Twelve is usually the minimum.”

  “Four would work better in such a small space.”

  “That’s why you don’t want me, Michael. I can’t be at my best if I can’t take all my stuff with me.”

  “Well, won’t you think about it?”

  I’ve always liked Michael. He isn’t just a wonderful pianist, singer, and impresario. He’s a wonderful man. I trust him. Several months later, an offer came in from him through my manager. Would I please do a show at his space at the Regency? That’s when I seriously started to think about what it would be like to put an act together for a small room. There have been some wonderful one-woman shows in recent years and I thought perhaps I could find my way to creating my own. So I finally found myself warming to the idea and saying to my agent, “Well, let’s try. Let’s see what we can do.”

  First, we made calls to see who was still around to work with. I needed a director, for starters. And when I was able to reach Larry Grossman after many calls, I said to him, “Thank God you’re alive!” We found Lee Norris, my old musical director of twenty years, too…hallelujah. And little by little we got this minuscule group together and started working.

  And that’s how I began the process of walking myself into the twenty-first century.

  This showbiz dinosaur was going to evolve!

  I was not expecting much when Lee, my musical director, suggested I come to New York to hear the band he’d pulled together. After all, it was only seven pieces. With my history of fronting orchestras of ninety musicians, and my regular routine of performing with a twenty-eight-piece group, fourteen at the smallest, what would this minuscule septet have to offer? Everything, it turned out. I could not believe how good the group sounded. They were top-level East Coast musicians, raised on Broadway and working around the greats, and what they sounded like was so inspiring I felt I needed a well-written show to rise to the occasion. Choosing songs was familiar. I’ve done that all my life. But what the hell was I going to say to t
his audience looking right up my nose?

  My shows had never been intimate. Just the opposite, actually. Now I had to come up with a script that was conversational, confessional, and entertaining. Larry found a talented writer, Stuart Ross, the creator of the hit show Forever Plaid. But when I sat down with him for the first time, things didn’t click. It took time and patience to find each other. Then he had an idea.

  “Why don’t we look you up on eBay?” he asked.

  So we went onto my computer, and with his touch of a button, my life flashed before my eyes. Posters from movies. Issues of magazines with me on the cover, including Good Housekeeping, which made me laugh because I never was and never will be a domestic goddess. Vinyl albums. A canceled check from Samuel Goldwyn. A tabloid headline that said DIAHANN WARNS DORIS DAY THAT NO MAN IS WORTH CRAWLING AFTER NO MATTER HOW LONELY IT GETS. Another old tabloid with a cover suggesting that Vic had Mafia ties and, by marriage, so did I. Julia lunch boxes, paper dolls, and Barbies. DVDs of me on Sonny and Cher and The Flip Wilson Show. Photos of me and Joan Collins on Dynasty with those big-shouldered Nolan Miller gowns.

  A landfill of detritus! My life had been reduced to this?

  Not at all, Stuart assured me. But it was a start for putting together a show.

  He got me to tell stories, the kind I’d never told before. Such as the time when my love life was at its lowest, and I booked a suite at the Plaza with the intention of doing myself in. First, I got my hair styled and trotted over to Bergdorf’s to buy a stunning nightgown with matching lace-and-satin peignoir. When I got to the hotel (with three sleeping pills and a bottle of Cristal in my Louis Vuitton overnight case), I was informed that a mistake had been made and I could not have the suite until the following day. I was offered a room instead by the service elevator. A room by the service elevator? I wouldn’t be caught dead (literally) in anything less than a suite! I was frantic. In my typically controlling way, I had it all planned and now it was falling apart. So I called a friend. She rushed over and we had dinner and polished off the champagne and ended up laughing until dawn. And the next day, I put my whole life back together.

  Stuart was also tickled when I told him that I’d been proposed to twice at the Regency, where my show would be playing. Here’s what we came up with: “I had two previous engagements here, one on the third floor, one on the eleventh. So when I was asked to consider this engagement tonight, my first impulse was to ask, ‘How many carats?’”

  We Googled. We giggled. We went riffling through my life. And as we did, something very interesting began happening over and over again. I found that despite my tendency in the past to take every single thing so seriously, and to consider myself something of a victim as I inspected every crevice of my psyche, I was laughing.

  And I was overjoyed when Bob Mackie made me the sweetest little dress for my return to the New York stage. I told him I wanted something understated. For once in my life, I didn’t want to hear people talking about my dress after a show as if it were the star, not me. Plus, he needed to come up with something modest in size, a dress that would not take up an entire room. That way, I would not ruin people’s hairdos as I threaded my way past them through the back of the little cabaret space to get onto the stamp-size stage. The dress Bob made was diminutive in size and demure in look, like a schoolgirl dress—black and white with a Peter Pan collar. And, oh yes, there were also thousands of tiny little glittering beads that sparkled like the skyline. The dress cost thirteen thousand dollars. It went very well with my “Give Me the Simple Life” medley, I have to say.

  On opening night, nervous as I’d ever been, I stepped onto that stage in front of my first New York audience in forty years. And I looked straight down onto the smiling face of none other than my friend Harry Belafonte. I could hear people breathing in that small room. Their proximity was indeed unsettling. But the band sounded great and I sang well, and when I told my first joke and heard the laughter, it was better than anything I’d heard in years. Frightened as I was to talk about my life, my loves, my ups and downs, it turned out that being honest and intimate, admitting to the big regrets and owning up to my funny foibles, forced me to face myself as a performer in ways I’d never tried before.

  And I am not being disingenuous when I tell you that I was shocked by the generosity of the New York Times review. Not only was my singing described as “erupting as if from a volcano.” I was called “an astonishingly youthful” seventy-year-old grandmother. Fortunately it was only the show that was referred to as “historic,” and not me. But actually, let’s face it—I am historic. There is hardly a place I haven’t been that doesn’t have history for me. And everywhere I travel, there is someone to see.

  And this new solo show of mine, something I had resisted because I was always a lady who needed things big…well, it’s turning into a big fat blessing for me. It’s years after that New York Times review and presenters in venues from all over the country still call and invite me to come tell my stories, sing a song, do my thing. How can I say no?

  Last November, Michael Feinstein invited me to be part of a show at a large theater in the Palm Springs area. I was delighted. I spent the previous week rehearsing in Los Angeles, primping and preparing and getting everything just so in order to give a flawless performance. I needed to be in shape for the stage—in fighting form. The theater was a thousand-seat house—a good size for the old girl. And although it was supposed to be Michael’s evening, he was gracious enough to offer to share equal billing with me. That’s more than I can say for some men I’ve performed with in my lifetime!

  On the afternoon of the show, I arrived and walked onstage to rehearse with the band and with Michael. That’s when I felt my throat going completely hoarse. That tickle I had been trying to brush off the day before was now manifesting itself as a full-blown, song-eating sore throat, a showstopper—but not in a good way.

  My manager, Brian, didn’t miss a beat and called a local doctor. Then I excused myself from rehearsal with little drama—as if I were just going to use the powder room—and I was whisked out of that theater and into a nearby doctor’s office, where I was rigged up to a machine that blew something into my lungs…cortisone, I guess; don’t ask me—I don’t even know how to send e-mails…and then whisked right back. It was kind of dramatic, a performing-arts emergency. But Brian had seen it all before. Peggy Lee, whom he had managed years ago, traveled with her own machinery for just such emergencies. And the result was that her lungs were always strong and her audiences always happy. That’s what it is always, always about for me and any performer worth her paycheck: making an audience happy by doing what makes you happy. It’s the greatest luxury in the world to be able to call that work.

  Back at the theater (which, I was told, I had headlined when it opened in 1986) I got on the stage with Michael. The band started playing, and was sounding great. We rehearsed “I Wish I Were in Love Again” and “Who’s Sorry Now?” and a few other feisty hits that make love sound more like war than romance. (Later in the evening, I dedicated them “to all my husbands.”) I went through each song with Michael as best I could. But there was no doubt that my throat was not in any shape for a good concert.

  “Oh, Michael,” I apologized. “I have a terrible frog in my throat.”

  “Well then, you might as well enjoy it,” he replied.

  And you know what? That’s just what I did. Well, why not?

  As I told the audience later, after Michael was kind enough to introduce me as “essential” to them, I thought I’d be dead by now. And besides, sore throat or not, I got to wear false eyelashes and a big blue gown to work—a getup that most women would be able to wear only on a red carpet or to a gala. Best of all, I was working with my friend and singing the songs I loved so dearly. I love working. It keeps me in touch with what makes me happy.

  At my age, I revel in every performance even with a frog in the throat. It’s surprising to find I can still be such a little trouper at seventy-two. But I’
m not alone in this. Everywhere I go, I find women my age having a ball just rolling with the punches.

  I mean, look at the change in the conversations we have these days about menopause. There are jokes about it on television, on talk shows and sitcoms and commercials. For women, it’s wonderful to be out of the closet with this little affliction. It was actually a word nobody wanted to hear for years. Menopause meant that you were unattractive and that everything was on its last legs. So even the mention of the word would provoke people to say, “Oh, don’t say that.” But I just love the fact that we are owning our bodies now, and that you can be at dinner with a friend who starts fanning herself with her hand and she can just say, “Oh, give me a second, I’m having a senior moment!” We are free enough to fan our faces in solidarity and enjoy it. I love it! It isn’t just good for senior women, it’s good for all women. How far we’ve come! Jay Leno now makes jokes about women who have to wear little pads because their bladders aren’t as strong as they used to be. Maybe it’s a little more vulgar than is appropriate. But it’s absolutely funny and true.

  Not long ago, we shot the cover of this book. In my typical fashion, I had spent a great deal of time preparing for the shoot. Greg, my favorite photographer in the world, was on board. And a dozen designer dresses had been sent over from Saks. They all fit as if they’d been designed just for me. But guess what? When I tried them on again the day before the shoot, I realized they were too tight. I had blossomed a full size since I’d last checked. How did that happen? I’d been exercising. I’d been watching my diet. It might have been my estrogen having its way with my body—something women of my age rarely talk about. The breasts get bigger without your permission, and like everything else we have to face when we hit our senior years, it can be a real roller coaster. Or perhaps I should say a Thanksgiving Day parade. I felt as big on top as a balloon in every outfit I had specifically chosen for that shoot. I don’t know why I hadn’t been prepared. These days I always travel to my shows with gowns in several sizes. I never know what size will fit me and I don’t want to take any chances. So in addition to all the other things I have to worry about when preparing to perform, it’s imperative I provide myself with enough wardrobe options to deal with a body that seems to have a mind of its own.