Bottom of the Top

"I feel," says Singer Diahann Carroll, "like I'm kind of at the bottom of the top; the best part of the beginning is now." Farther up the ladder roost more gaudily plumed stars of Singer Carroll's spotlighted world--Lena Home, Ella Fitzgerald, Harry Belafonte. That last rung of the climb is sometimes the trickiest, as countless slipped disks will testify. But when she moved into the Persian Room of Manhattan's Plaza Hotel last week, Diahann trailed the kind of notices no new female singer has received in years. Twice each night she demonstrated why.

Public-Private Image. If Eartha Kitt appears before her audiences as the feline temptress and Lena Home as the sophisticated lady with a past, Diahann is the ingenue of the trade--sweet but sexy, and eager to learn. When the soft blue lights came up on her last week, she tilted back the high-cheekboned, full-lipped face on the swan neck and gave out with a brassily exuberant Everything's Coming Up Roses. From that the voice could sink to a smoky purr in a slow Too Much in Love or take on a rasping burr in an upbeat All or Nothing at All. In a white fringed shawl Songstress Carroll sat with a single spot shining on her tawny face while she sang a moving set of folk songs with powerfully restrained drama. Later she was on her feet again belting out a Heat Wave with the raucous abandon of a Merman. In the course of the long show, Diahann Carroll displayed only one serious weakness: an occasional tendency to oversell her role, as in her version of Just Lookin' Around, which was so coated with coy baby talk that the message never filtered through.

At 24, Diahann (pronounced Diane) Carroll has given a surprising amount of thought to what her public-private image should be. "The difficult, dangerous thing for a performer," she says, "is deciding, 'Just who am I?' It must come from living. What you are in life, you are onstage. Maybe a little less inhibited, but the same person." Daughter of a New York subway conductor, Diahann (born Carol Diahann Johnson) showed youthful musical talent, won a Metropolitan Opera scholarship at ten. "That lasted no more than a month," she says, "because I told my mother I wanted to be the roller-skating champion of the world, and those damned singing lessons interfered with my practice."

How to Relax. By the time Diahann entered New York University (to study sociology), she had decided that she wanted a show-business career after all, quit school, allowed herself a two-year trial period in which to find success or failure. She won $3,000 on a TV talent show, was booked by Broadway Impresario Lou Walters into his brassy Latin Quarter. Diahann was an instant hit, shared top billing with the changeable Christine Jorgensen, who taught Diahann how to bow like a lady ("Darling, like so . . ."). At 19 she drew raves as Ottilie (alias Violet), the naive young girl in the Truman Capote-Harold Arlen musical House of Flowers. She also married the show's casting director, Monte Kay.

After countless TV appearances. Diahann landed the role of Clara in Sam Goldwyn's gilded production of Porgy, was horrified when Musical Director Andre Previn permitted her only to mouth the lyrics to Summertime, dubbed in the voice of French-English Songstress Loulie Jean Norman. Explains Previn: "Diahann's voice was a full five tones too low." But Previn also thinks that Diahann has only begun to find her way on that ladder. "When she learns to relax as much on a nightclub floor as in the studio," says he, "she ought to scare people to death!"

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