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What helped was that my mother, even though we didn't have a lot of money... allowed me to take part in the Girl Scouts.

I was a brownie for a day. My mom made me stop. She didn't want me to conform.

I am an aging Girl Scout.

My mother was a star-struck girl from a little town in Arkansas who had gone to finishing school in New York, and whose mother had given her anything she ever wanted.

James Brown became my father. He would talk to me the way a father talked to a son. He became the father I never had.

I always wanted to be a boy scout but was too poor. Couldn't do it.

I was one of those daughters who saw my mother as my enemy when I was a teen.

My father died when I was young, and my mother, Ruth, went to work in an office selling theater and movie parties. She put me through private school, Horace Mann, in Riverdale. She sent me to camp so that I would learn to compete. She was a lioness, and I was her cub.