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much, to lecture her about things her old-fashioned soul didn’t want to accept? Did I have to hold her responsible for so many of my failings as a woman and a wife? Was it necessary to shake her up with every little thing I’d learned about myself in psychotherapy? And could I not have allowed her a few more indulgences in the accessories department? Maybe I didn’t need to tease her quite so much about her big earrings. She was a simple, polite, churchgoing lady who liked to do things properly. Okay, well, maybe not that properly, when the truth came out. But I didn’tdiscover all that about her until much later in our lives. My mother!
    She did look fabulous in her casket. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
    Some people might say I’m too image-conscious. They don’t think that walking around in beaded dresses and heels adds up to a meaningful life. I don’t do that every day. But I do it more than your average senior citizen. What can I say? It pleases me to know I’ve been on the International Best Dressed list twice in my life. I want to make the best entrance I possibly can. Just as I select songs for my cabaret performances carefully, I select wardrobe with great attention to detail. Materialistic? Of course it is. I’m nothing if not materialistic, and have been since I was young. My idea of a good time is shopping, and nobody is going to make me feel guilty about it. And I don’t care what today’s actresses tell you about having their best times in jeans and T-shirts, they are as image-conscious as those of us who grew up with a more studied idea of style.
    Blame it on the movies, if you like. I grew up watching MGM musicals, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Lena Horne, all women who were concerned with looking smashing, not natural. Then there was the woman who schooled me early on in the ways of style—my mother. She was a high-school-educated woman with a highly developed sense of dignity, and she was on a mission to make me aware of how good I looked.
    My confidence, my drive, and care about my personal style all come from her.
    We didn’t have much money, but, oh, did we have style!
    My parents were practically children themselves when they met in 1931 at a carnival on Long Island. My father had just come up to New York from Aiken, South Carolina. My mother was just up from Bladenboro, North Carolina, and had been looking for work, with the encouragement of her own hardworking mother, while on her summer vacation. She was twenty-one, he was twenty, and working as a lithographic printer as well as a caddie on Long Island golf courses. He did not have anything beyond an elementary school education, and she only got as far as high school. But they had charming smiles, social grace, a relentless urge to escape the South and improve their lives, and, well, to be frank, a healthy attraction to the opposite sex. They liked each other right away. “That’s the man I’m going to marry,” my mother told a cousin when she first saw my father.
    Mabel Faulk, my mother, was striking. She had great cheekbones, her mother’s almond-toned skin, and smoky, intriguing eyes. Her features were well proportioned and she had a shape that was coveted at the time—ample breasts, small waist, and full hips. She was never thin, but always voluptuous, with the most lovely legs. She wore shorts until she was eighty-two years old, bless her, and her hair was always thick and dark. She knew she was attractive and she worked it. Her glance was more solicitous than seductive. At any rate, men always looked.
    My father, John Johnson, was always a looker. He was a man’s man—tall and solid, and powerful in stature, with warm amber skin, a strong nose and mouth, and piercing, animated eyes. He was never much of a talker. A black boyraised in the South by a quick-tempered father learns how to keep his mouth shut. A black boy who was once almost set on fire