Free The Legs Are the Last to Go by Diahann Carroll Page B

be, she wasn’t afraid to let me know when a man had sex appeal.
    â€œWell…” She’d sigh. “He could certainly put his shoes under my bed.”
    Sometimes I’d argue with her, and sometimes I’d agree. “Yes, Mother, he’s very attractive and he can certainly put his shoes under my bed, too,” I’d say. It was a funny little female-bonding thing, that’s all, and we’d laugh at each other in delight.
    I still remember how excited she was to help me get ready for a singing contest I had entered in Philadelphia as a teenager. “What are you going to wear? Should we have a new dress made or should we go shopping?” It was never so much about what I was going to sing as what I was going to wear. She loved how pretty I could look, and I loved making her happy. She’d drive me to all kinds of contests. We were as excited as kids.
    When I graduated the High School of Music and Art, Itold my parents I could not uphold their lifelong dream of attending Howard University. It was too far away, and it would keep me from my lucrative modeling work with Johnson Publications. My career as a student of psychology at NYU didn’t last long, either. I’d show up in class carrying my leather hatbox so I could run off to a photo shoot, and my professors saw this preoccupation reflected in my grades. In my freshman year, I entered a television contest called Chance of a Lifetime, and was called in. I sang “The Man I Love” and “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and won for three weeks in a row. My prize? A staggering three thousand dollars and a week’s booking at the famous nightclub and society venue the Latin Quarter.
    A seventeen-year-old girl singing in a nightclub is not exactly a parental dream scenario. The Latin Quarter served liquor. The Latin Quarter had showgirls in scanty costumes. It was no place for a performer to bring her mother. And besides, there was no room for her in such a hectic backstage, with performers changing costumes night by night. I learned by watching, as I did at modeling jobs, the strong-willed women around me. The showgirls at the Latin Quarter, for instance, might have dressed like loose women, but they were very focused and meticulous backstage as they prepared themselves for each costume change, and I heard them discussing diet and exercise with the knowledge of true professionals. It was from them that I learned how important it was to take care of my skin, hair, teeth, and physique, along with my voice. And it was from the transsexual Christine Jorgensen, also performing at the club, that I learned to bow. She was a lovely person. I took it all in, just as I had taken in my mother’s lessons in childhood.
    And frightened as I was, my mother’s training served me well as I took to the stage in my grand gown of tulle and my tiara, and told myself, “Here you go, Diahann Carroll,” and stepped out, scared but not paralyzed, to sing my heart out into the darkness.
    Around that time, my parents got a call from the Lou Walters office. Lou Walters (Barbara Walters’s father) owned the Latin Quarter. He also owned a personal management company and he wanted to sign me. He believed I had a big future in the business. So at the same time as I was leaving NYU, a new education began for me. A young manager from the Walters office named Chuck Wood took me under his wing. He quickly became a mentor, taskmaster, and second family to me.
    Although the Walters Office made its bread and butter booking singers into nightclubs and Catskills hotels, Chuck loved the theater. He thought I belonged on Broadway and he was relentless in getting me to sing each song perfectly. “You’re stiff,” he’d say. “Relax! You’re not letting us hear the lyrics! Do it again!” He’d cook dinner for me in his apartment in Greenwich Village, and introduced me to new foods as we continued lessons by his