Free The Legs Are the Last to Go by Diahann Carroll

There I was in a magazine read by his community, posing only in a bra and petticoat, and he was so upset I had to agree never to pose in those kinds of shots again. I was far too young at the time to tell him he was in danger of being a hypocrite. Much as he liked to promote only the most upright behavior, he was taking the flirting in our church just a littletoo far. Well, that church, after all, was full of women terribly excited to be under the same roof as the stunningly handsome Adam Clayton Powell Sr. And any handsome male whom women there would see (and especially one in black tie and white gloves serving as a deacon, like my father) turned their well-pressed and-curled heads. It’s only recently that I have come to realize that a church where everyone is looking his or her best can also become something of a henhouse, and maybe even a brothel. At any rate, my father had been unfaithful for years. I still remember the time he took me with him to visit the home of one of his female “friends.” She lived on St. Nicholas Avenue, not far from us, in a well-appointed apartment. Even at the age of seven, I knew something was not proper when she greeted us at her door in a flowing peignoir. Prim and proper in my patent-leather shoes and sky-blue smock dress as innocent as anything Shirley Temple was wearing, I sat down in her small front parlor. It was stuffy. A clock on the mantel was ticking, making me feel like a bomb about to explode. They chatted for a while, and the woman said some pleasant things to me about my church singing. But I knew being with her was terribly wrong even then. By osmosis, I had learned from my parents what was and wasn’t proper. I was ashamed for all of us.
    And so, in my mind, the strict churchgoing father with family values had no real grounds for objecting to my posing in petticoats in a magazine. But I agreed that I had done something wrong in order to placate him. Soon enough, people from the neighborhood and at church found me posing in that spread, and congratulated him. I think he was surprised at how impressed they all were. But then, I was soon getting paidten dollars an hour, an impressive sum in those days that went right into my college account. It was hard for my father to put up much of an argument. I was succeeding, even before college, in a way that my driven, disciplined parents had never expected.
    The more I modeled for Johnson Publications, the more I supplemented what I was learning at the High School of Music and Art. Innocent as I was, I was getting a chance to see the unimaginably cosmopolitan worlds of successful black editors and publishers, who had secretaries and expense accounts. It was the 1950s in New York City, and seeing a woman like Freda DeKnight, the fashion editor of Ebony, riding in a limousine to a photo shoot on Sutton Place left a deep impression, to say the least. I knew I had my mother to thank for preparing me for all this, and pushing me off the cliff, as it were, to take on the life of a model and a performer, but I never thanked her.
    My success was thanks enough for her in those days.
    I had a friend in high school named Elissa Oppenheim. She was a piano player and I was a singer. We’d practice together at each other’s home and worked on an act that we were sure would break us into show business. She was the one who wrote to Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts for an audition. It was a very popular television show in the early 1950s. When we got our audition, the name of our act, Oppenheim and Johnson, was deemed too imposing, according to a sharp-tongued producer who met with us. At the time I didn’t see the point. But it is a bit of a mouthful, I suppose, for a couple of teenage girls with a high sincerity level. So Elissa changed her name toLisa Collins, and for me she suggested Diahann Carroll. It turned out my first name was spelled that way on my birth certificate anyway, as I soon found out when applying for a