Rant #2,450: Julia

On early Friday afternoon, we learned that Diahann Carroll died, reportedly losing her battle with cancer.

She was 84 years old.

Carroll was an absolutely beautiful woman in her day, but she had a lot of talent to go along with her good looks.

She was one of the stars of the popular night time soap "Dynasty," was a mainstay on TV for decades, performed in Las Vegas, on Broadway and won a Tony Award as the first lead black actress to do so, put out many recordings, was a model and rumor has it, her resemblance was used to create the first black Barbie doll.

She was married to singer Vic Damone, was engaged to David Frost, and her name was constantly in the gossip columns for one reason or another.

But I want to center on a small period of her career, when she portrayed Julia Baker, a nurse who lost her husband in the Vietnam War and was raising her son alone, on the NBC sitcom "Julia."

Although the show was on for just three seasons, and was a Top 30 hit through at least two of its three seasons, it introduced my generation to Carroll, and it changed the face--literally--of television.

Back in 1968, blacks were being shown on network TV, but mainly in background roles, although some did break through, such as Ivan Dixon on "Hogan's Heroes," but generally, blacks were nothing more than window dressing in particular scenes on popular TV shows.

Then "Julia" came about, and television was never the same.

For the first time, a black, female character was the star of a show, the focus of a sitcom, and the emphasis of the themes of this show. "Julia" faced a lot of backlash from all sides--some network affiliates would not show it, some people thought she was simply portraying a white role in a black face--but the show persevered, and it stands as a landmark in TV history.

Julia wasn't a domestic, wasn't a broken woman, or an alcoholic or a drug abuser or a prostitute or whatever other roles black women often portrayed on TV at the time.

She was a working mother, a nurse in a dentist's office--Lloyd Nolan was the doctor, Dr. Morton Chegley--and she lived happily among the white tenants in her apartment building, which seemed to be mainly inhabited by whites--including the Waggedorn family.

Her son--Marc Copage as Corey Baker--had a best friend, Earl J. Waggedorn, who was whiter than white, and everyone seemed to get along so very nicely in this community.

Of course, save the mention of Vietnam, this was a time of civil rights, riots and other things happening in our society, but in this community, well, time kind of stood still.

And this got people's ire, saying that the world on "Julia" was a perfect world, not the real world, and that the show was completely unrealistic. The show heard this outcry for its entire three-year run.

But whatever the case, Carroll was the centerpiece of the sitcom, and this had never happened before on network TV.

I lived in a community where blacks and whites lived together like they did on "Julia," although not 100 percent like they did on that show. Rochdale Village in Queens, New York, was a brand new mixed-race community, plunked down right in the middle of the one of the oldest black communities in the U.S., Jamaica, Queens.

I remember that there was great anticipation when the show premiered, and probably 90 percent of our neighborhood's residents watched that first show. The next day, just about everyone was talking about it, positively and negatively and somewhere in between, but for the three years it was on, probably 90 percent of that original 90 percent never missed an episode.

This was how Rochdale Village was supposed to be, and maybe in our fantasies, this is how it was, to a certain extent, but like the show, that feeling only had a short shelf life, and when it was over, it was over.

And the same could be said across the U.S. This was the way it was supposed to be, but reality then set in, and it wasn't this way at all.

Watching "Julia" today, Carroll does what she can with a basically one-dimensional character, but she sure does it well. The rest of the cast pushes on, too, but again, this is a sitcom-perfect world that is being displayed on that show, and when the news came on later in the evening, you realized that this was what it was, a sitcom trying to portray a perfect world, not the real world.

Even Carroll addressed the problems of the show, stating in one interview that she was portraying a "white Negro." Whatever the case, she was the perfect actress to play the title role--she was well known, was good looking and had a load of talent--and she did it with much aplomb.

The show was a Top-30 show for its first two seasons, but in the third season, "Julia" began to veer off from its "perfect world," taking on social issues like civil rights and employment. One of the themes of that season was that the office that she worked in, and the larger corporation that it was part of, was being downsized, and the company was getting rid of non-whites at a faster rate than whites.

Julia somehow survived, but some of the larger corporation's bigwigs wanted her to go too. When Dr. Chegley got wind of this, he brought up the Civil Rights Act, which had only been put into law a few years before ... and Julia was saved.

But not the show.

The show fell out of the Top 30 and was canceled, as viewership abandoned the show when it got too topical. The producers and Carroll had reportedly tired of the show at this point, so it was time to move on.

Being a trailblazer did not assure Carroll of a long career path, but she carried on after the show ended. She was nominated for an Academy Award in 1974 for the film "Claudine," perhaps a more realistic portrayal of a black woman raising her children without a man in the house, and in the 1980s, she landed in the world of "Dynasty" as Dominique Devereaux, and probably made her everlasting mark there.

But she set the tone, literally, on "Julia," and for that, Carroll will be remembered for being able to do it and do it well.

And that is what I will remember her for most, and I am sure I am not alone in that belief.

Before I go, I have to acknowledge two more notable deaths in the entertainment spectrum.

We lost Rip Taylor, 84, this weekend, and this guy was ubiquitous on TV and in Las Vegas from the late 1960s through the 1980s and early 1990s. He was full of sequins and a toupee, used to throw confetti all over the place, and certainly was one of the more visual comics ever. Given his big break by Ed Sullivan, Taylor was seemingly never off TV during his peak period, appearing on every talk show and variety show there was, and he was rip roaring funny.

We also lost Ginger Baker, 80, the drummer best known for his time with the band Cream, during the weekend. Baker's backbeat propelled the band--including Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce--to international stardom in the late 1960s, with songs such as "Sunshine of Your Love" and "White Room" defining their heavy sound.

Carroll, Taylor and Baker will definitely be missed, in particular by Baby Boomers who were wowed and thrilled and invigorated by their performances during their peak periods of stardom.