70 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • MAY 2020
REAR VIEW
DIAHANN CARROLL
A TRAILBLAZING MOTHER
BY ANNIE WILKINSON
When Diahann Carroll died of complications
of breast cancer in October 2019,
many mourned for the first African
American woman to lead an American
TV series. She broke long-standing barriers
playing a professional woman and
single mother in the award-winning
late 1960s TV sitcom Julia.
In reality, she was also a single working
mother, to her daughter Suzanne. But
she augmented that role by becoming a
mother figure for actor Marc Copage,
who played her TV son. For years, he
thought of her as the only mother he
had ever known.
Before Julia, Carroll was a singer, Broadway
star, and advocate for breast cancer
research and treatment. In the summer
of 1967, she juggled these roles — plus
recording an album and performing
nightclub dates — from Fire Island.
PEACE IN THE PINES
Earlier that year, The 31-year-old realized
that she hadn’t taken a vacation in
12 years.
She told Newsday, “I’m so uptight, I
really need Fire Island.”
She had gone through a divorce from
first husband Monte Kay, and sought a
place on the Atlantic Ocean for relaxing
with her daughter Suzanne, 6. She
found it in the Fire Island Pines, the
hamlet where Elizabeth Taylor, Rock
Hudson, Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner,
Julia Roberts, and other notables could
stroll along on the car-less island.
She rented the so-called “ugliest house
on Fire Island,” previously rented by
movie star Montgomery Clift before his
death in 1966. She became the hamlet’s
most photographed celebrity, and was
praised for her community involvement.
She vowed to build a home there,
to “have a vacation every year from now
on,” adding, “Have you ever seen me so
relaxed in the city? Never.”
There, she had time to reflect on life’s
challenges and her achievements. She
was born Carol Diann Johnson in 1935
Diahann Carroll with her TV son, played by actor Marс Copage.
in the Bronx, to parents who struggled
financially and abandoned her when
she was 18 months old. They left her
with her aunt in North Carolina for
more than a year while they built a
better life in New York’s Harlem.
Carroll started singing with a Harlem
church choir when she was 6 years old
and later attended New York’s High
School of Music and Art. By age 19 she
was acting in films and on Broadway;
five years later the elegant beauty was
appearing on Jack Paar’s and Steve
Allen’s late-night television shows. In
1962 she won a best actress Tony award
for the role created for her by revered
composer Richard Rodgers in the musical
No Strings.
SHATTERING THE RACIAL
CEILING
She personified the new black woman.
But her success was an entertainment
industry rarity. She described herself as
“living proof of the horror of discrimination”
in late 1962, testifying before a congressional
hearing on racism. “In eight
years I’ve had just two Broadway plays
and two dramatic television shows.”
The civil rights movement was gaining
momentum. While in No Strings, Carroll
had received anonymous death
threats. The Ku Klux Klan threatened
the cast and crew of the 1966 film Hurry
Sundown, in which she costarred. The
movie was the first to film in the South
with an integrated cast and crew, infuriating
some locals. They slashed tires.
Someone set a cross on fire on the set
late at night.
In 1968, Julia aired the first episode of
its three-year run on NBC. The premise
generated controversy as America
was ripped apart by the Vietnam War,
riots, and the assassinations of Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. and presidential
candidate Robert F. Kennedy. Julia was
condemned for “glossing over the stark
realities of life that black Americans
faced daily,” wrote The New York Times.
But, the paper’s critic Jack Gould added,
“At all events the breaking of the color
line in TV stardom on a regular weekly
basis should be salutary.”
MOTHERING
After her Golden Globe award-winning
turn in Julia, Carroll was nominated for
an Oscar for the 1974 film Claudine,
appeared on TV, and resumed her
role as a glamorous chanteuse; three
presidents invited her to White House
receptions.
She remained close to Copage, who
played her television son from age 5
to 8. Because he had no real mother to
turn to — his mother left when he was a
toddler — he saw Carroll as his real-life
mother. Perhaps she became a motherly
figure to him because of her own childhood
abandonment.
Shortly after Carroll’s 2019 death,
Copage wrote in a New York Times
piece: “Carroll taught me to always be
punctual and a person of my word, as
she was …. She would let me know if I
started to get a little too pudgy.
”I’ve always wondered if my real mother
knew I was on a groundbreaking
television show where an actress played
the role my real mother didn’t want. For
three wonderful years, I was lucky that
Diahann did.”
”I’ve always wondered if my real mother knew I
was on a groundbreaking television show where
an actress played the role my real mother didn’t
want,” wrote Marc Copage.
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