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is.”
    So, as I say, show business can be cruel. Sunset Boulevard epitomizes that, and Norma Desmond is an example of what it’s like to fight with the fact that you are getting older. Well, we do have a terrible problem with age in this country. But you know what? I think it’s ridiculous for older women to allow themselves to be so demoralized. Say what you want about Norma, at least she had the wherewithal to try to get someone to write a script for her so she could have a role to play. She did what she could, and only when she realizes that she is no longer wanted, not by Hollywood and not by her young man, does she have her famous “ready for my close-up” meltdown scene. I’m glad that I’ve figured out at this tender age that public recognition is not the most important thing in life. I’m glad I have friends around to laugh with me and discuss the pros and cons of liposuction and other pertinent issues of the day. It’s a lot more fun. On the other hand, imagine how gratifying it was for me, at the end of that show in that theater in Toronto, to stand at the top of a staircase and go stark raving mad? That scene is the perfect fulfillment for any actress who has spent her life in the industry.
    Well, in a way, I really was going mad at the time. Things with Vic Damone, my fourth husband, were falling apart. Inmy Sunset Boulevard interviews at the time, I’d joke about how wonderful it was to play Norma Desmond.
    â€œShe goes mad and shoots a man eight times a week,” I’d say.
    I was only half joking.

Diahann Carroll and mother, Mabel Johnson, at the Alzheimer’s Disease Research and Patient Care Fundraising Gala, Beverly Hills, March 2, 1985. (Photograph by Ron Galella/WireImage)
TWO
Queen Mother
    SO HOW DOES A GIRL FROM HARLEM GROW UP TO BE a doyenne of stage, screen, and TV, with a penchant for couture, coiffure, Rolls-Royces, and the great composers of her time? In the tradition of so many memoirs, you can blame it all on my mother. She is the woman who made it her business to nurture me so completely as a child that I felt beautiful and special from the start. She lived a long life. When she died in 1999, I was already in my sixties, a senior citizen myself. The day of her passing, I didn’t pause for even a moment to reflect on how important she’d been to me. I didn’t cry, either. I simply flew into combat mode, the way I do when I’m pulling one of my shows together for the road, and I started making the funeral arrangements. I told the young woman at the funeral parlor that I would bring in all my mother’s personal makeup, everything she had, “And I want you to make her look like a movie star.” She never liked having gray hair, but she had no choice but to let it go gray in her last year. So I had it dyed black for thefuneral—just the way she liked it. The makeup job was subtle. The color of her outfit was not. I put her in a military red Diahann Carroll suit, a color she always loved in her favorite designer label.
    I guess I wasn’t, at that moment, able to accept the loss of someone who had always been such a presence in my life. And I wasn’t ready to accept the fact that we had all kinds of issues that remained unresolved right to the end. Or perhaps I should say I had all these issues with her that I’d never resolved for myself. It’s strange. I am a woman known in my profession for having a level head. To survive in show business, especially when race is part of the scenario, it helps to keep calm. But just thinking about my mother, all these years after she’s gone, still makes me feel flustered, like a child who cannot figure out how to get her point across to the most important person in her life.
    â€œMom!” I hear myself saying over and over. “You don’t understand!”
    Are there any more familiar words between mothers and daughters?
    Why did I need to harangue her so