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Diane's father Jack is a handsome, prosperous engineer with his own consulting firm, and her mother Dorothy is a pretty woman who once won a "Mrs. Los Angeles" contest. She is a semipro photographer, and Diane herself works seriously at photography (Photoworld magazine plans to publish a six-page spread of Keaton's photographs). The family seems close, loving and untroubled, a warm tribe whose members liked to sing together. From all accounts, Diane's childhood in Santa Ana was the sort that would leave a person quite unmarked. And unmarked is what Diane sometimes seems. Only one comment among her recollections raises a faint doubt. She enjoyed going to the Methodist church, she says, because she liked singing in the choir. The memory raises the thought of childhood guilts: "I used to pray a lot. You know, apologize." She has been apologizing ever since, though for what is not clear. Apology is her public and private manner, and it is the core of her comedy.
She matured from a skinny, late-developing kid to a somewhat overweight teenager, which may explain a measure of her insecurity. She was forever falling in love from afar with bronzed basketballers, "because they were unattainable. I wasn't up for the real stuff." Her dates were amiable shorties, the proles of a high school social order. She overdid clothes and makeup: "White lipstick and black net stockings. Oh, wow."
Keaton remembers that "when I was really small I used to go out in the yard and sing to the moon. It was like plugging into a great big battery." In ninth grade, "through sheer want," she made it into the school talent show, singing All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth with another girl, "with our front teeth blacked out. La-de-dah, hey?" And in her senior year, playing the second lead in the school production of Little Mary Sunshine ("The star was beautiful; I was the funny one"), she plugged into the great big battery again. "I sang my solo and then I was backstage, and I heard this sound. And then I couldn't believe it. It was applause, and they were clapping for me, and it was SO LOUD!"
She went to college (a semester at Santa Ana College, a few months at Orange Coast College) "for the musicals." Allen agrees that she didn't learn anything else. He now has great respect for her native intelligence, but believes "when I first met her, her mind was completely blank."
Her high school acting teacher suggested she enroll in Manhattan's Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater. Jack and Dorothy Hall stowed their four children into a Ford van, and drove to New York to investigate. Diane entered the school on a scholarship. It was in early 1968—finished with school, finished with summer stock and four months into a depressing period of trying out for parts and not getting them—that she attended an audition for Hair. She was rejected. "I went out to the elevator, and man, did I feel bad. I mean, I felt bad. I was thinking, 'This is ridiculous.' Then along came one of the producers, this French guy, and he said, 'No, you stay.' I have no idea why he decided to keep me."