I think that’s when my parents saw I was a little girl who was going to be in show business”). In kindergarten, she was asked to read poetry for her classmates in the school auditorium (“I couldn’t wait to do it. Her parents - John, a subway conductor turned real estate whiz, and Mabel, a housewife - were “very loving and very supportive and very Baptist church.” They raised her and her younger sister Lydia in Harlem in an open-minded world where sharing opinions “was our oatmeal.” More to the point, perhaps: “My entire schooling was integrated.” She was wearing a nurse’s uniform, wearing those cute little hats!”Ĭarroll came from a more enlightened place. “ Julia was not wearing anything that was familiar to their idea of a black woman. “Of course there was reaction from ,” says Carroll, preferring not to dredge up ugly examples. Worst of all was the inflamed reaction from some whites who didn’t want to see blacks at the front of the TV bus. Disregarding its determined foot in the door, critics derided the show as whitewashed, suggesting its depiction of an upbeat black character who worked and supported a child was somehow a disservice to, as one writer opined, “the bitter realities of Negro life in the urban ghetto.”īlack groups were upset that the show seemed to extend the image of the fatherless black family. When it premiered opposite the entrenched Red Skelton Hour, it was a smash (it ranked number seven for the season in the Nielsens). There is always someone who says, ‘We can do this, but we can’t do that.’ But Hal said, ‘No, it has to be done this way.”įew shows in TV history have arrived with as much buzz as the genial Julia. “Hal wanted a show with completely integrated characters. Sitting together, working together, living together, existing together, interacting - it was very difficult.” She credits Kanter for creating a show that made all of the aforementioned look easy enough. In the late ’60s, “everything was erupting in every area,” Carroll recalls, “and racially, Americans were not that familiar with each other. But Julia was the Enterprise of TV shows, boldly going where no other had gone before. That bit of dialogue from Julia’s premiere episode - it debuted Septemis a milestone in pop culture’s own march for civil rights.īill Cosby had recently been winning raves and Emmys as Robert Culp’s sidekick on I Spy, several hip crime dramas like The Mod Squad included a black detective in the mix, and the same season Carroll’s sitcom debuted, Star Trek’s Captain Kirk and a certain lieutenant named Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) shared a kiss. Chegley: Have you always been a Negro, or are you just trying to be fashionable? Julia (on the phone applying for her job): Did they tell you I’m colored?ĭr. But Julia Baker, as imagined by show creator Hal Kanter and smartly played by Carroll, was a wry-witted, quietly spirited widow who juggled motherhood (Marc Copage played her son Corey), working as a nurse, dating and friendships, some of whom were white people like her boss, Dr. The 1950s had begat Beulah, a sitcom that revolved around the doting maid of a white family. In 1962 - in the heat of the Civil Rights era - she earned a Tony for her turn as a fashion model in love with a white journalist in the musical No Strings in 1974, she nabbed an Oscar nomination for her delightfully lively, titular performance as Claudine, a single, scrappy mom trying to raise her kids on welfare.īut it was Carroll’s work on Julia - the first television series centered on a professional African-American - that truly changed lives. There have been hard-fought triumphs in showbiz, too. Want the survivor angle? At age 63, she was diagnosed with breast cancer - and rebounded quickly and became a determined activist. On the page-turning memoir side, Carroll has been married four times (tragically, one husband died in a car crash her last union, to singer Vic Damone, ended in 1996). Grow up a little bit, please, Miss Johnson.’”Ĭarroll - born Caroline Diahann Johnson in 1935 - not only wound up starring in Flowers, she has since lived enough to impress even Capote. “And Truman said to me, ‘When you go to California to do your movie, do a little living.’ I said, ‘Why?’ They said, ‘Just listen to us. After their talk, Capote and Flowers’ famed tunesmith Harold Arlen “placed me on the elevator leaving this penthouse,” recalls Carroll. The incorrigible author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s was meeting with Carroll about a role in House of Flowers, a musical based on one of his short stories that was gearing up for Broadway. One afternoon back in 1954, Diahann Carroll - then 19 and a rising actor-singer who had just booked a part in the big-screen version of Carmen Jones - was letting her ingénue-ity show to Truman Capote.
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