“Richard Rodgers Is Calling”

Abstract Before Rodgers selected her to star as the African American in Paris in No Strings (1962), Diahann Carroll (1935-) had made her Broadway and Hollywood debuts at the age of nineteen in Harold Arlen’s House of Flowers and the film version of Hammerstein’s Carmen Jones. Her work in No Strings led to the first Tony {American Theatre Wing Prize) awarded to a black actress in a leading role (shared with Anna Maria Alberghetti for Carnival) and her pathbreaking title role in Julia (1968-71), the first television series to star an African American. Younger television viewers may recall her stint as a wickedly beautiful villainess in the popular soap opera Dynasty {1984). In Diahann, Carroll makes several serious accusations against Rodgers. She quotes him in a homophobic slur against his first lyricist, she recalls his callous acceptance of a patron’s racism and attendance at a theater party from which, as a black woman, Carroll was excluded, and blames Rodgers for at least tacitly agreeing to the selection of a nonblack actress to play the lead of a projected No Strings film (the film was never made). By the time Carroll’s memoir appeared, Rodgers was no longer alive to defend himself. The following decade, his biographer, William Hyland, while acknowledging Rodgers’s reticence and perhaps discomfort at fully confronting Hart’s homosexuality, considered Rodgers’s alleged disparaging remark “highly implausible.” As recently as the American Masters PBS profile on Rodgers, ‘‘The Sweetest Sounds” {2001), Carroll has publicly denied a sexual affair. Biographer Meryle Secrest, however, presents evidence from photographs and interviews to suggest that Rodgers was at the very least emotionally involved with his leading lady during the development and rehearsals of No Strings [Secrest, Somewhere for Me: A Biography of Richard Rodgers {New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001)].