Remembering Diahann Carroll

Dihann in a 1976 publicity photo

“Deep down, I never saw "Julia" as a documentary, and I didn’t see why, to be worthwhile, it had to be about a Black woman wearing an Afro and dashiki and living in the ghetto. It was a sitcom. And it was a successful one. I knew why it was pulling in ratings, too. It made the White majority feel comfortable with a Black lead character who was not offensive to them in any way. And frankly, it was a role I was glad to portray.”   

- From Diahann Carroll’s 2008 autobiography, The Legs Are the Last to Go: Aging, Acting, Marrying and Other Things I Learned the Hard Way

"Julia divided critical consensus, It was praised in some quarters as groundbreaking and criticized in others as recductive, Pollyannish and accommodationist - condemned in short for glossing over the stark realties of life that black Americans faced daily."

- From Diahann Carroll's obituary in The New York Times, October 8, 2019

Talented Diahann Carroll was an American actress, singer and television trailblazer with her starring role on the sitcom Julia.  Diahann was born Carol Diann Johnson on July 17, 1935 in the Bronx, New York City.  At an early age, she moved to Harlem with parents.  Her father, John Johnson, was a subway conductor, while her mother, Mabel (Faulk), was a nurse.  From childhood, music was an integral part of Diahann's life.  By the time she was six, she was singing with the children's choir of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem.  She also took piano and voice lessons.

Diahann was awarded a Metropolitan Opera scholarship for studies at New York's High School of Music and Art.  As a teenager, she looked for modelling work, and was hired by Ebony magazine.  However, it was her voice that made an impression.

The teenage Diahann began entering television talent contests.  At 16, she auditioned for Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts show.  She won the competition and performed on the daily radio program for three weeks.   In 1954, Diahann appeared on the DuMont network's  Chance of a Lifetime, a television talent competition.  She won $1,000 top prize for her rendition of Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein song "Why Was I Born."  Engagements at Manhattan nightclubs such as Cafe Society and the prestigious Latin Quarter soon followed.

Diahann's parents wanted to have a college education, so she enrolled in New York University, where she majored in sociology.   However, she left before graduating in order to pursue a career in show business.  Diahann promised her family that if she didn't succeed after two years, she would complete her college studies.  As it turned out, she never returned to college.

At 19, Diahann won a Broadway role, which was rare for Black singers in those days.  She was cast in the musical House of Flowers, starring Pearl Bailey.  Diahann and Pearl Bailey worked together again when they had supporting roles in Carmen Jones, a 1954  all-Black film version of the Bizet opera Carmen, starring Dorothy Dandridge.  The film also featured Harry Belafonte.

Diahann played Clara in the 1959 film version of the 1935 Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess, directed by Otto Preminger, and starring Dorothy Dandridge, Sammy Davis Jr. and Sidney Poitier.  Diahann and Poitier soon began a nine-year love affair which led to the collapse of both of their marriages.  In a 1980 article in People magazine, Poitier described his attraction to Diahann.  He said, "We had not been on the set of Porgy and Bess in 1959 more than a few days when I realized that she was unique.  She had fantastic cheekbones, perfect teeth and dark, mysterious eyes.  She was confident, inviting, sensuous - and she moved with a rhythm that absolutely tantalized me."

Diahann Carroll and Sydney Pointer starred in the 1961 film Paris Blues, along with Paul Newman and his real-life wife Joanne Woodward.  It's a story about a pair of expat jazz musicians (Newman and Poitier) living in Paris.  They meet two American women (Joanne Woodward and Diahann Carroll)  on vacation, and they all fall in love.

Carroll and Poitier in Paris Blues 

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Diahann gained a reputation as a singing personality on television, with her performances on the shows of such late night hosts as Jack Paar and Steve Allen.  In the early-to-mid 1960s, Diahann continued with nightclub entertaining, along with guest appearances on the musical variety shows of Carol Burnett, Judy Garland, Andy Williams, Dean Martin and Danny Kaye.

In the early 1960s, Diahann Carroll appeared in two crime dramas - Naked City (1962) and The Eleventh Hour (1963).  Yet, jobs were few and in-between.  In late 1962, Diahann testified at a congressional hearing on racial discrimination in the entertainment industry.  "In eight years I've just had two Broadway plays and two dramatic television shows," she stated.  That all changed when she was given top billing in a new TV comedy.

From 1968 to 1971, Diahann played the lead role in the sitcom Julia.  She portrayed Julia Baker, a widow raising a young son.  Julia's husband, Army Captain Baker, an artillery pilot, had been shot down in Vietnam.  Julia worked as a nurse in the doctor's office of a large aerospace company.  Veteran movie actor played the doctor, Morton Chegley, a curmudgeonly man with a soft heart.  Marc Copage played Julia's son, Corey Baker.

Julia was a trailblazer for its time.  Diahann Carroll was not the first Black woman to star in her own television series.  For example, three different actresses - Ethel Waters, Hattie McDaniel and Louise Beavers starred in Beulah (1950-1953), a show about the misadventures of a maid dubbed " the queen of the kitchen."  However, Diahann was the first African American female to star in her own series who did not play a domestic worker.  Julia Baker was not a stereotypical maid or mammy.  She was a nurse,  She had a professional career.  

Nevertheless, Julia did not escape criticism.  It received disapproval for portraying such a rosy version of the Black experience in America. Julia's apartment was elegant, her wardrobe was fashionable and expensive, and she was even-tempered.  None of this, the show's detractors argued, was an authentic representation of the life of a single working mother with a young child.

 In a 1968 interview with TV Guide, Diahann responded to the criticisms.  She said, "At the moment, we're presenting the White Negro.  And he has very little Negro-ness."  The shows defenders argued that Julia laid the foundation for other TV shows to portray Black characters in a variety of non-stereotypical situations

In a 1970 Ladies' Home Journal article, Mylie Evers, the widow of the slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, wrote: "Of course Julia bears little resemblance to me or any other flesh-and-blood woman.  She is a television fantasy like so many others.  The significant difference is that Julia Baker is black."

Julia rose in the ratings and Diahann Carroll received a Gold Globe award for "Best Newcomer."  She also earned an Emmy nomination.  The series only lasted three seasons, at Diahann's request. She asked to be let out of her contract because she had grown weary of the the controversy surrounding the show.

Below is a  photo of Diahann Carroll with Lloyd Nolan and Marc Copage.  

From 1984 to 1987, Diahann portrayed Dominique Deveraux in the prime time soap Dynasty.  Dominique, a cat-like diva, was the half-sister of wealthy oil tycoon Blake Carrington (John Forsythe).. Diahann's character was written out of the series at the end of the seventh season, and did not appear in the 1991 miniseries Dynasty.

Diahann on Dynasty

From 1989 to 1993, Diahann had the recurring role of Marion Gilbert in nine episodes of the sitcom A Different World.  The series, created by Bill Cosby, focused on a group of students at a historically Black university.

From 2006 to 2007, Diahann appeared as Jane Burke in five episodes of the medical drama Grey's Anatomy.  Diahann's final television acting role was as June in 26 episodes of the police drama White Collar from 2009 to 2014.

Diahann Carroll was married four times.  Her first husband was Monte Kay, an American musicians' agent and record producer.  While performing in House of Flowers, Diahann fell for Monte, who was the casting director.  She wed him in 1956 and they divorced in 1963. 

In her autobiography, Diahann claimed that Sidney Poitier persuaded her divorce Monte, and he agreed to divorce his wife to be with her.  She wrote that Poitier did not keep his part of the agreement.  He eventually divorced his wife, Juanita Hardy, but not until 1965.  In 1980, Poitier told People magazine why he and Diahann finally broke up.  He said, "She asked me to move out of my home, and I did.  She asked me to get a divorce.  I went to Mexico and got one.  I made one request to live together for six months while Diahann's parents looked after her daughter so I wouldn't be jumping from one marriage straight into another.  But she wouldn't do it.  It was than that our relationship started to unravel."

Diahann was young when she married Monte and she "had a lot of growing up to do."  Nevertheless, she was thankful for the union because it produced a daughter, Suzanne Kay, born on September 9, 1960.  Suzanne became a journalist and a screenwriter.

In the early 1970s, Diahann had a relationship with British TV journalist David Frost.  The couple were engaged for a short time, but never married.

Diahann and David in 1971

In February of 1973, Diahann married a Las Vegas boutique owner named Fred Glusman.  Four months later, Glusman filed for divorce.  Diahann did not contest the divorce.  She dismissed the brief union as "a silly marriage and a silly divorce."

On May 25, 1975, Diahann, 39, wed Robert DeLeon, 24, the managing editor of Jet, a news magazine for the African American community.  In March of 1977,  DeLeon was killed in a car crash.  He was found in the wreckage of a Ferrari at the bottom of a canyon in Malibu, California.

Singer Vic Damone was Diahann's fourth and final husband.  They married in 1987 and performed together for nightclub and concert tours.  Their relationship, however, was turbulent, and they legally separated in 1981.  The couple attempted a reconciliation, but the reconciliation didn't last, and  the marriage ended in divorce in 1996. 

Diahann and Vic Damone

In 1997, Diahann was diagnosed with breast cancer.  After surviving cancer in the 1990s, she became a public advocate for screening and treatment.  She died of complications from the disease at her home in West Hollywood, California on October 14, 2017.  She was 84 years old at the time of her passing.

END NOTES:  

* In 1962, Diahann Carroll became the first African American woman to win a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical for her performance in No Strings.

*  Diahann received an Academy Award nomination for her performance in the 1974 film Claudine, a romantic comedy-drama.  She portrayed Claudine Price, a single Black Harlem mother with six children, who falls for a garbage collector played by James Earl Jones.

* In 1976, Sidney Poitier wed Joanna Shimkus, a Canadian film actress.  They remained married until Poitier's death in 2022.

* In 1996, Diahann played Norma Demond in the Canadian production of Andrew Llyod Webber's musical version of  the film Sunset Boulevard, which starred Gloria Swanson as Norma, an egotistical silent movie star.  I attended that show at a theatre in the Toronto area.  Unfortunately, however, I was unable to see Diahann perform on stage.  Much to my disappointment, an understudy played Diahann's role on the night I attended.

* Diahann was the author of two memoirs - Diahann (1968), with Ross Firestone and The Legs Are the Last to Go (2008), with Bob Morris.

SOURCES: Legacy.com (obituary), "Diahann Carroll (1935-2019), pioneering actress starring in 'Julia'," by Linnea Crowther, October 4, 2019; New York Times, "Diahann Carroll, Actress Who Broke Barriers With 'Julia.' Dies at 84," by Margalit Fox, October 8, 2019; Wikipedia; Internet Movie Database (IMDb.com)

- Joanne