My Life As ... Dirty Joke?
After my termination, for the next 27 years, it was less than hilarious fun to smooth out aluminum foil for a second use and pinch pennies in a struggle to remain financially solvent while I watched what I believed was Erika Slezak, Robin Strasser, Bobby Woods, the late Clint Ritchie and the late Phil Carey blow up into megamillionaires. All had joined the show in later years. None had played any role in making Nixon's maiden voyage such an instant success. From my point of view, I was the one who had done the heavy lifting that made that possible.
That I survive my experience, I owe to my remarkable sister, Jean, the true beauty in the family, as you can see from these photos of her when we were young. I will always be grateful for her enduring psychological support and the generosity with which she shared her family, as it was my ill fortune never to have one of my own.
When I signed that last two-year contract that inched me over the line into six figures rather than five, I had begun plans to adopt. When I lost the job, without the wherewithal to give black children the first-class education they would need to survive "the system," I thought it would have been selfish to proceed.
I was born into a brilliant black family that, since the early 1800s, raised its children from the cradle with a sense of moral obligation to be useful to their country and to their people. A number of institutions around New York City are a testament to their success in fulfilling that mandate. To name just three: P.S. 175 is named after my great-grand-uncle, Henry Highland Garnet, the Presbyterian minister and abolitionist who, in concert with Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, conferred directly with Abraham Lincoln. J.H.S. 265 and the Susan Smith McKinney Nursing Home are both named after my great-grandmother. In 1870, she graduated from New York Medical School and Hospital for Women as the valedictorian of her otherwise white class to become not only a well-known doctor but also an early feminist responsible for founding the Equal Suffrage League of Brooklyn. My great-grandfather, James Theodore Holly, ordained in 1874 at Grace Church down in Wall Street as the first black bishop of the American Succession of the Protestant Episcopal Church, was also a passionately committed abolitionist.
My aunt, the Civil Rights leader Anna Arnold Hedgeman, was one of the three major architects of the 1963 March on Washington along with Roy Wilkins, then head of the NAACP, and the legendary labor leader A. Philip Randolph, the founder of America's first black union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The bottom row of photographs on the back dust cover of one of my aunt's books, The Gift of Chaos, shows the three of them seated in front of a map, planning the route. Thanks to my aunt and to my own labors as a '60s activist, I was seated on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial about 10 feet behind Martin Luther King when he spoke the magic words "I have a dream."
Given the usefulness of my ancestors to their country in general and to black people in particular, the great tragedy of my life, as I look back on it, was that, in my personal opinion, I had crossed the path of a person prepared to utilize the peak years of my shelf life as an actress to set up a half dozen or more performers, all of them Caucasian, to become phenomenally rich. Because that outcome falls so grotesquely far afield of what I aspired to do, on some of my grimmer days, I experience my life accomplishment as a mockery ... a drastic failure ... a dirty joke. What had I wanted my life to be about? In the introductory chapter of my book I wrote: "I was, in deeply significant ways, the polar opposite of 'Carla.' My beliefs were radically different. The scope of my dreams, the breadth of my experience, infinitely larger. The role of a lifetime I had chosen for myself was Joan of Arc, earnest soldier in passionate battle to change the world's perception of my people. Born into an enchanted world of black Kings and Queens and Warriors-of brilliant dark ballrooms and black chandeliers-I experienced my blackness as thrilling and longed, through gifts for writing and acting, to illuminate for the world the radiance of that internal vision."
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Jean marries
