The Nine Lives Of Dianne White

"'Old what's-her-face--is she still alive?' About half of you folks thought I was pushing daisies. Well, surprise, surprise--I'm still here."

That's the way Dianne White Clatto imagines that fans from her Channel 5 days think about her--if they think about her at all. Still strikingly attractive at 66, the celebrity best known as Dianne White is a living contradiction: accomplished yet self-deprecating, engaging yet shy, religious yet irreverent.

Her career is a study in firsts: White was one of the first African-American students at the University of Missouri. Before the age of 21, she was the first black model for a major St. Louis department store, working for both Stix, Baer & Fuller and Saks Fifth Avenue. Only a few years later, she became the first full-time African-American weathercaster in the nation, at what was then KSD-TV. From the weather map to the anchor desk to live news, reporting from the field, there were few positions she didn't try during her 26-year television stint.

She's also enjoyed a semiprofessional singing career with the Russ David Orchestra, helped raise bonds to build the Arch and opened 11 Girls Clubs--all while raising a son, marrying three times and maintaining an enviable social life. Her past also includes a bank scandal that resulted in a federal larceny conviction.

But White never planned to be famous, infamous or even a pioneer. She says every opportunity she had--good or bad--came looking for her. Now a special assistant to Mayor Francis Slay, she begins each morning by telling herself: "This is going to be the most wonderful day!" Laughing, she adds, "which is a bunch of beans and potatoes. But I'm on the right track--I'm trying, right?" Wild optimism, quickly blunted by down-home realism, is an attitude White cultivated growing up as an only child in a poor St. Louis family in the 1940s.

She flourished under the attention she received from her mother ("a sweet child from Mississippi") and her father's sister ("the artsy one--never married"). Through her mother, White learned about faith and gained an appreciation for what she calls "the finer things." Much of that education took place in the outdoor classroom of Forest Park.

"We took a blanket to the Muny where the free seats are," White remembers. "She would fix our lunch; she'd let me feed the birds. We found all the monkey shows, and we knew all the trainers by name."

It was a schoolteacher aunt who first expanded White's world beyond the Gateway City. While working toward a master's degree at Columbia University in New York City, Aunt Fotchie--White's baby word for "Florence"-- mingled with the famous NAACP leader Roy Wilkins and his crowd. When White was a young girl, Aunt Fotchie shared her insights, provided intellectual stimulation and made sure her niece took piano and dance lessons.

"Toe dancing--I hated it because I had blisters," White says with a wince, "but I loved modern dance. It was all to teach you discipline. She also taught me the challenge of the New York Times crossword puzzle. She had the wherewithal to expose me to that style of thinking."

Much more complicated was White's relationship with her father, whom she found difficult to respect. "My daddy was an alcoholic and smoked Camels until cancer hit him in his 70s. I told him I loved him as my father but I didn't like him as a man."

Despite his shortcomings, White says, her father did impart at least one important lesson: acceptance. "Daddy taught me how to deal with all of God's children," she recalls, "no matter what their persuasion."

She also learned to look out for herself.

"I was trained to get ready for life, to get an education," she says. "I wasn't taught to try and catch a man to take care of me and have a bunch of babies."

So it was with a spirit of unbridled independence that, mere days after her 1956 graduation from Sumner High School, White headed to the University of Missouri- Columbia, where she was one of just eight black students on a campus of 14,000. She immediately embraced the role of rebel. "Just to show them, I started dating the starting left end of the University of Missouri football team, who was very much white. If his daddy had known about me, I'd probably have been tarred and feathered--and I just did it just to be devilish!"

She also challenged the racist attitudes that played into dorm-room assignments.

"I was stuck in Johnson Hall, in a 305- woman dormitory, with another black woman with whom I had nothing to do at Sumner High School. Now why in the hell would I want to have anything to do with her at the college level? I did a clothesline down the middle of the room, and I said, 'You only pass under here to go out the door.'"

Human behavior--her own and others'-- fascinated White and inspired her to major in psychology. The insights she gained during her college years would serve her well as a young adult, when she worked with many high-profile personalities and large egos. Her first foray onto the stage came at the suggestion of her high school choir teacher, who urged her to audition as a singer with the renowned Russ David Orchestra. It was a tryout that turned into an impromptu live performance on the Admiral showboat during which she belted out "I Enjoy Being a Girl" and "How About You." Not long afterward, when White was working as a city manager for Avon, a man named Harold called to make an appointment. When she showed up for what she thought was a sales call, she found out that her meeting was with Harold Grams, the general manager of KSD-TV and radio.

"He tells me what I'm there for and I slide down into my chair, I'm laughing so hard!" Years later, White learned that after her Admiral performance, David had suggested White to Grams as a candidate for what was known at the time as a "weathergirl" for the weekend slot. Soon White began training with Weather Corporation of America, the National Weather Service and station weathercaster Howard DeMere. She kept her Avon job to supplement the $75 a week she earned at KSD.

White was soon ready for her first weathercast, but the question loomed: Was St. Louis in 1962 ready to accept, much less embrace, a black woman on the air?

"How are we going to do this Dianne White thing?" she remembers the station's decisionmakers wondering. "Were they going to offend the people, or the ones the station was more concerned about than the people--the advertisers?" Even as management debated the impact of her on-air presence, White refused to be stereotyped.

"The application at Channel 5 still had all those boxes about races and what color you are. I checked all the boxes; then, on the back, I wrote 'G-u-e-s-s!' I am African American, but I am also Irish and American Indian."

White rehearsed and prepared for her debut. Then, moments before the theme music began, nature called. "I had a case of diarrhea to beat the band with two minutes to air. I don't know how I got through it."

She raced back onto the set just in time, and although her debut went well, St. Louis gave its first black on-air personality a mixed reception. "Why don't you get off the air and give some nice young white girl your job?" one caller asked.

But it was White's on-air pregnancy that created an even bigger stir. White met and married the city's first black male newscaster, Fred Porterfield; got pregnant; and, a la Lucy Ricardo, dared to "show" on the air. Even though she only gained 11 pounds during the entire pregnancy, the viewers eventually noticed.

"There were three women rotating at nighttime to call me after the 10 p.m. news: 'Get the nigger baby off the air.' They wanted to know why in the hell didn't I get off the air and stop teaching sex education."

But as time went on, White won over many viewers.

"South St. Louis embraced me so beautifully! The Christmas stocking I use for my son to this day--and he is 37 years old--was hand-knitted by a lovely little lady in South St. Louis. She even worked 'Chipper'--his name--into the top of it."

The 1970s brought big changes to the TV industry, and White's career rose along with them. Weathergirls were out-- meteorologists were in. Veteran newscaster Dick Ford recalls how "every station in the country had good-looking women doing the weather, and then they shifted over to the scientific method." It was a revolution steeped in sexism, often putting men on the weather set and some women out of a job, but it propelled White to the anchor desk.

That meant news anchor Ford would no longer be doing a solo slot at Channel 5 but a double act--and working as a mentor as well.

"Dianne asked a lot of questions, and I tried to help her out because it's a big shift from being the sparkling weathergirl," Ford remembers. "We got to interview all these spectacular celebrities that came through town. She did very well at that--that was right up her alley."

Ford says that White was a quick study in many ways: "She was a very experienced broadcaster; it was just a matter of shifting over. We didn't have teleprompters in those days. You read your copy with a piece of paper in front of you. It was really getting a grasp of the copy and being able to look at the camera. She was a good performer."

But Ford believes that White didn't take advantage of the television wave that might have taken her into the national spotlight. Female newscasters were red-hot, and black women could often write their own tickets to the national networks.

"Everybody in the early '70s was looking for good articulate black people," Ford reflects. "It was such a new thing, nobody knew where it was going to go. We didn't have agents or managers in those days. I think, maybe, if she'd had the right advice or right counseling, she could have gone very far."

White did venture "out in the field" as a news reporter, and Channel 5 news photographer Frank Scalise remembers that she played down her celebrity: "She made fun of herself all the time, even when she was a beautiful young lady. She'd say, 'Oh, this old gal, she can hardly make it anymore.'"

Scalise says that White's biggest accomplishment was making other people feel comfortable.

"She was able to raise and lower her demeanor to whoever and whatever she was around," Scalise recalls. "She'd slip on her boots and walk down a field and then put on her high heels and go down the runway. She'd walk into the office of a president of a company, and then she'd have people over at her house and take her shoes off. Every year she had a big New Year's Eve party and invite tons and tons of people, from the very, very wealthy to those who did not have too much."

White was also known as the "card lady." Scalise recalls, "She had stacks of greeting cards, and she was always sending thank- you notes and asking, 'How's your family doing?' I don't know what she must have spent on greeting cards. For a lady as busy as she is to take the time to do that--that always touched my heart."

White hit her stride in the late 1970s and early '80s, when "live coverage" and "action news" became the buzzwords of the day and KSD became KSDK. Some of her favorite stories involved sports, and she covered many events by literally throwing herself into them. She particularly enjoyed suiting up to play with the St. Louis Cardinals during spring training in Florida.

"I went down there and the body was toned and Mother was looking good!" White laughs. "I wore leotards and red hose."

Women were just beginning to do sports reporting, a development that revolutionized coverage. "Women were asking the things that everybody wants to know," White recalls. "Men reporters will beat the damn drum to death. You can have 20 damn runs and because of two errors in the game, you lose it. How is the player supposed to feel? Pissed, that's how he feels. A woman will come up and say, 'Did you talk to your mom about your loss, or did you talk to your wife?'"

But, like a benched ballplayer, White found herself suddenly out of the television game in 1986. At the age of 48, making the relatively small on-air salary of $42,000 a year, she was fired. Asked whether she sued for age discrimination, she prefers to recast the sentence: "My attorney sued"--for $6 million. The suit was settled for $110,000. But just a few months later, in the fall of 1988, White noticed an unexpected $135,000 deposit in her Mercantile Bank account. She says someone at the bank told her that everything seemed to be in order, that the money was indeed in her account. So when her godchild needed tuition money and her father had hospital bills, she used some of the windfall to help them. "I didn't buy myself a damn thing," she adds.

White was charged with one count of federal larceny. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to pay $50,000 in restitution and serve six months in a halfway house. She says she paid back every penny, going beyond the terms of the sentence. And even though she pleaded guilty, she maintains her innocence. "You literally lose your mind in something like this," she says. "I never broke so much as a jaywalking law in my life."

As for the halfway-house experience, she says, "I don't want to get into that. It was extremely emotional."

White was down but far from out. After her departure from Channel 5, her face--but not her voice--disappeared from the St. Louis airwaves as she spent the next several years in radio. She hosted a three-hour talk show at black-owned public radio station KBDY and did a four-hour shift at KXOK talk radio. Soon she returned to television, hosting her own weekly cable program, Shades of Success, which aired for nine years.

Her resume is packed with awards and accolades, complete with kudos from Mayor Alfonso Cervantes, the St. Louis Black Journalists Hall of Fame, the Jewish Community Association and the American Cancer Society. She still hosts Turn Around St. Louis, a half-hour cable show. And her performance skills come in handy today as she "meets, greets and proclaims" to the public in her job as Slay's assistant.

"Isn't everything political?" she asks. "You have to have a pretty good sense of who you are, know your own value system. You just say, 'Hey, it is what it is.' Besides, most of the people who come in--the movers and shakers--have known me 20 or 30 years, so there's a human element."

She says when people recognize her at the grocery store or the Galleria, she is "humbled beyond words"--especially when they say, "Why don't you get back on TV? You never lied to us, never pretended to be anything you weren't."

Would she return? "Oh yes. Think of the market now," she says. "Think of the over-50 crowd we never paid any attention to before."

White intends to share more of her analysis of life--even details of trysts with movie stars and politicians--in a book with the working title She Tried. Passionate about many issues, she deplores racism and sexism.

"I'm very bitter about it," she admits. "Years ago, I would be a goody-two-shoes and say I was not bitter about certain things, and one morning I realized, 'You're not fooling anybody.'" She is convinced that today's brand of discrimination is more covert, and therefore more damaging, than it was several decades ago. She laments that today's world lacks kindness and says if people could fathom what makes human beings tick, there would be less judgment and more compassion.

"We would understand there is usually an underlying reason for somebody to be a perfect ass or a goody-two-shoes all the time or for someone to blow up like a Goodyear blimp all of a sudden," White says.

Now the widow of John Clatto, her husband of 25 years, she leads a relatively quiet existence, one that includes a daily battle with the pain of spinal stenosis. "I'm able to hide it quite effectively most of the time," she says, "but some days it's to the point I'm on the verge of tears. I suck it up and take another pain pill and settle back in my chair. I find smiling a lot rubs off. Still, I'm used to standing tall and erect and telling young ladies, 'Hold your head up high and quit looking at that floor'--and I hate it like hell."

Yet, despite the pain, she says this is a life that more closely matches her true self.

"I'm the biggest introvert you've ever seen in your life," she says. "When I interviewed Lena Horne, she told me the exact same thing: When we go out the door, we belong to the public, but our most peaceful time is with the door closed. I can close everything out and only let in those things which I want."

The things she cherishes include her son, Chip, who works as the student-retention director for Gateway Technical Magnet School and does archaeological digs in North St. Louis; his wife, Noelle; and White's first grandchild, due August 8. Other than her family, she says, she needs only life's basic necessities.

"I want some peace, a roof over my head, electric lights, heat, to be able to pay my bills--and real people, just decent people not affected by their own Dun & Bradstreet report, not affected by a blouse with some fancy designer label in it," White muses. "Just plain everyday people--they are the gems of our society."

By Nancy Larson Photograph By Katherine Bish