Diahann Carroll TV Series 'Julia' Remembered by the Late Actress

There was so much that Diahann Carroll achieved in her life and career, as was widely reflected on following news of her recent death, but what needs to be emphasized is how groundbreaking she was in her achievements, particularly early on. For instance, in 1962 she became the first black actress to win the Best Actress Tony Award, in her case for the Broadway musical No Strings. Then, perhaps more importantly given the audience she reached on a weekly basis, from 1968 to 1971 she was the first black actress to star in her own television series and to portray a character who wasn’t a stereotypical one.

The show was the Classic TV comedy Julia, which saw her portraying a widow (her husband was a pilot shot down in Vietnam) raising a son (Corey, played by Marc Copage) alone. She’s hired as a nurse in the office of a doctor at a large aerospace company. In its own way, it was a show that seemed to allow Diahann to shatter the glass ceiling for other black women.

“Absolutely not,” she differed to Closer in an exclusive interview. “I had a wonderful writer, Hal Kanter, and he was thrilled to be doing this. He knew more than I understood at that time how important it was in the television industry to move along with these ideas. Coming into the world of television through Hal Kanter and several other people who were very much in my corner and very helpful, Julia was introduced in the magnificent way it should have been introduced. With 20^th Century Fox and NBC I felt as though I had died and gone to heaven. It was just lovely. Everyone was so dedicated to making this something quite special.”

But not so special, she emphasized, that Diahann or the show could be credited with paving the way for people like Phylicia Rashad on The Cosby Show or Debbie Allen, her sister, who a part of the spinoff to that show, A Different World.

diahann-carroll-julia-3 — 20th Century Fox Tv/Kobal/Shutterstock

“I think there were a group of us who were forging the hood,” she noted. “At that time, I did not understand and Hal told me, ‘You’ll see what this is going to do.’ He was very proud and so was I. But the environment in which I was growing up also included other black performers, actresses, actors … everything. I knew it was going to be important, but it took a while for me to understand just how important and I’m very proud of it. When I see ‘her’ running around in her little hat and uniform, she’s adorable.”

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Early Resistance

When the concept of Julia was first offered to her, Diahann was extremely reluctant to accept, largely because of the relatively short time she was on the set of films like Carmen Jones (1954) and Porgy and Bess (1959), whereas a TV series sounded like a major time commitment. “I really didn’t believe this was a show that was going to work,” the actress pointed out to the Archive of American Television in an extended career profile. “I thought it was something that was going to relieve someone’s conscience for a very short period of time. And I really thought, ‘Let them go elsewhere.’ But there was a very good friend and a smart man at NBC and he called me very early on in the proceedings. He said, and this is funny, ‘You don’t want to do it. And the executive producer doesn’t want you to do. He doesn’t feel that you could do it, but I think you can do it.’ And I said, ‘I’m not moving to California; I don’t want to know anything about living in California. I need this place in my life that validates me constantly. And that’s New York City.’ I suppose they waited maybe six months or so before they called back said, ‘I don’t want any arguments from you, I want you to come to do the audition.’”

Reverse Psychology … Or Something

Diahann asked again whether or not Hal wanted her to do it and was told absolutely not. When asked why, she was told it was because of the amount of work she had done in Las Vegas and on the Broadway stage. That that wasn’t the image that was wanted. Instead, Hal Kanter wanted housewives to feel comfortable with the character of Julia. Hearing this, and feeling defiant, she flew to California a few days before she was going to audition and worked with friends on create a look for her as the character that would prove Hal wrong. And it worked.

A Scary Situation

As Diahann remembers it, at the time everybody was scared of the show, because, she said, “we were gong to present a very upper middle class black woman raising her child and her major concentration will not be about suffering in the ghetto. And you don’t know if they’re going to buy it, but this is what we were going to do — take a different point of view about blacks in the United States. There are many people who were very, very incensed about that. They felt that we don’t have that many opportunities on television or in film to present our plight as the underdog. As the one who was not allowed to enter the finer houses of education; that the suffering was much too acute for us to be so trivial. They felt that to present a middle-class woman who is dealing with the business of being a nurse in an aeronautical company with no black male was the argument. No father image.”

Sticking to Their Vision

“That was a very loud criticism, very often,” she added. “We were of the opinion that what we were doing was important and we never varied from that or left that point of view. Even though some of the criticism was, of course, valid, that’s not what we were doing. We were of the mind that that was a different show. And we were allowed to have this show. We were allowed to put this point of view on the air. We were allowed to have a comedy about a black middle class family. Television was going to have the kind of scope in time that would allow the ghetto situation, the middle class situation, the upper middle class situation. Hal and I were of a like mind about that. So while the criticism was heavy and sometimes very, very unkind — sometimes threatening — we stuck with that premise.”

Seeking Help

Black psychiatrists were hired for the show to help guide them and make sure that the Corey character, and a friend of his, were made aware of the idea of adult black males. “It’s not that we didn’t talk about situations,” said Diahann. “It may not have been this life, but we did talk about situations. Also, the mother dated and we brought the male into the house to say hello to the son. And usually it was another professional black that the young man was exposed to. As we look back, we feel very proud of that. It represented a new thought. It represented something that was subject to a great deal of criticism.”

Narrow-Minded Criticism

It was her belief that those who criticized the show to that extent were more narrow-minded and less visionary than those behind the series. “This was a working mother,” she emphasized. “Even our living circumstances, her apartment, you can’t believe people wrote columns saying things like, ‘How could you live in that apartment?’ It’s a little two-bedroom apartment! It was just the source of so much criticism. And where does she get those clothes? We said, ‘It’s television. We’re not doing a documentary. You have to change that thought.’ Where did Marlo Thomas get those clothes on That Girl? She’s an out of work actress! We began to say, ‘You must stop believing that the only thing that is valid for blacks on television is the documentary. We’re doing a comedy. Let us do a comedy.’”

Serious Threats

It got to the point where Diahann was receiving genuine threats from people, including that she would be hung and her house burned to the ground. She was called a “terrible sellout” and questioned as to why she would be in something that didn’t demand that a black man be there. “If you recall during that period,” she noted, “several shows became reality that did not represent a male in the home. They were single women’s issues shows that were beginning to be addressed. That’s what we were doing very, very well. Before Hal created the show, he went to a NAACP dinner and the speaker was Roy Wilkins, who was very annoyed with the television industry in that there were not more positive black role images on television. Hal left that dinner with this very much on his conscience. He went home and began to put Julia on paper.”