Charles and I had decided to move to New York together. We had found a little rent-controlled apartment an older alumna was subletting. I remember Charles told his mom, “Look where Angela keeps the money.” I felt like I had to think about that for both of us.
Late that spring of my third year, Charles, John Turturro and I took a prospective student to a pub to talk to him about “the Yale experience”. The brother’s name was Courtney B. Vance.
Chapter 4
A Million to One
My first semester at Harvard was tough. Seeing my parents walk down the stairs was really hard. I can’t imagine what that is like as a parent—are you bereft or ecstatic, or a combination of both? All I know is that I really, really, really missed Mom and Dad that fall of 1978. I had a hard time adjusting to college and all the academic pressure. “What grade did you get? What’s your major? What are you going to do?” Plus, I wasn’t raised to be a party boy, drinking beer and hanging out, which it seemed everyone was doing. At least in October I got to go to Swarthmore to visit Kristin. But when I was there she started talking about how maybe we should break up. When I got back to school, a “Dear Courtney” letter was already waiting for me. But needless to say I was blue. I threw myself into my classes and my work-study job.
Because I had done so much stuff in high school, I was exhausted and had had enough of extracurricular activities. I decided I would just run track and focus on figuring out what I wanted to do for my career. Figuring out what to do was important to me. My dad didn’t seem to enjoy what he did for a living. After watching him struggle, I knew I wanted to find something that I was happy doing.
My plan was to meet as many new kids as I could so I could find out what their parents did. I knew that not knowing what we wanted to do, we would talk to each other and figure it out. But when I got there, I learned that everyone but me already knew what they wanted to do.
“I’m gonna make the money, brotha.”
“How do you know? You’re only eighteen,” I’d ask.
“What do you mean—how do I know?”
“Where did you find that out?”
I was shocked. I felt like I was behind the eight ball, so I went to the Office of Career Services and Off-Campus Learning. You could supposedly go there and tap into alumni for career advice in certain fields. I’d try to contact the alumni but all their phone numbers were no good.
“I feel like such a loser,” I told the career counselor.
“What are you talking about? You’re a freshman!” she said. “What are you doing in here?”
“I feel like I’m behind everyone else.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” the counselor laughed. “Now, get out of my office!”
That fall I started training with the track team. Because of that, I was with the same group of guys all the time. I liked them, but I felt like I did that in high school—hang out with the same kids all the time. “This is not working. This isn’t part of my plan.” I felt like I needed to be with a new group of people if I was going to meet kids and find out what their parents did. That’s when it hit me—that was the end of competitive athletics for me. I felt like maybe I could meet more kids if I auditioned for plays.
I hadn’t done much acting before. Right before I graduated from Country Day, I had played the tiny role of Mr. Witherspoon in Arsenic and Old Lace. It was a lot of fun and I promised my teacher I’d try acting again. But at Harvard acting was a big deal. Every department, every house had a different dramatic society. If you wanted to act, you could go from show to show to show. There were hundreds of plays and musicals going on at one time—large, medium and small. Multiply that by all the different colleges in Boston and there were thousands of plays going on in Boston at any given time. I figured I’d try out for some of them. It wasn’t about the acting; I wanted to meet new people so I could figure out what I wanted to do.
The first audition I went to was for a play called Mars. We had to pretend to be things like steam, mist, fire and darkness. While I was waiting to be called, a beautiful girl caught my eye. Whoa! I thought. Inspired by her beauty, I threw myself into my roles: steam, mist, fire, darkness! I got a part. And that girl, whom, to allow her some privacy I’ll call Ahren Moore, ended up being my girlfriend for the next eleven years. Ahren was an actress and dancer and very graceful—tall, statuesque, gorgeous. She was a sweet girl. I really liked that she was honest, simple and positive. In her world, the glass was always half-full. Ahren was the picture of beauty, inside and out. Her character and beauty were exactly what I had been raised to look for. And she was just the right girlfriend for a young man who had walked out of his family’s house an innocent, who didn’t know about the birds and the bees.
After my freshman year I returned home to Detroit. Jobs were hard to find that summer. I was blue. I knew my parents needed me to earn money to help out. Something finally broke in July. My dad knew someone at GM who got me a job filing papers. I started thinking that I might want to work there one day, so I became “Henry the Explorer” all over again.
I’m going to read about the different offices at the world headquarters, I thought. Then I’m going to go to every office and tell them, “I’m going to be a sophomore at Harvard. I just want to know what you do.”
All of GM opened their doors to me. I’d call the VP of Legal or Purchasing and say, “I don’t want to take up your time, sir, but I’m a sophomore at Harvard and may potentially work here. Do you mind talking to me about what you do?”
I met so many people that summer. The guys I was working with would ask me, “What are you doing on your lunch break?”
“I’m going to a meeting,” I’d say. Then I’d leave my paper-filing job to meet with the VP of Worldwide Purchasing. When I left to return to school, everybody loved me and wanted me to come back to GM.
During the first semester of my sophomore year, I got bitten by the acting bug. I had a hard time telling Ahren that I wanted to be an actor. She was a serious actress. I was reluctant to tell her. I thought she wouldn’t respect me or wouldn’t think I was serious enough. I didn’t want her to think that I thought that I could just come in and do what I’d call “this acting thing.” I thought she’d say, “You can’t become an actor, Court. This is my thing. This is what I do.” When I finally told her, she was glad and told me she thought I was good. It was a big relief.
When I went home that Christmas I still didn’t know what I wanted to do for a living, but at least I felt like I had a plan. I told my parents, “I want to take a year off and act.” I wanted to go to Banff, a famous drama and arts center nestled in the Canadian Rockies. I had the brochure all ready and everything.
My parents just looked at each other. Cecilie was caught up in the Vietnam protest movement and struggling to stay at Michigan State and now here I was, wanting to drop out and act. They had taught me that I could be anything I wanted, but I’m sure in their minds they were thinking, “Oh, God, no! Not that!” My folks didn’t know anything about acting except that most actors were unemployed, especially black ones. But they couldn’t go back on what they had taught me now.
“Son, we don’t mean to diminish what you want to do,” my dad said. “But you can’t take a year off. If you do, it will extend our payments. Stay in school, finish up and then you can do that.”
“But I really want to act,” I pleaded to my mother. “I don’t know what I want to do for my career.”
“What happened to all your confidence?” she asked.
“It’s just so hard. Everyone seems to know what they want to do.”
“You’re going to figure it out, son,” she told me. “It’s going to be all right.”
I was really disappointed, but what they forced me to do was come up with plan B. I realized I was at Harvard to expand my mind and learn, so I would do that. But people had been telling me about this thing called drama school and it sounded like something I wanted to do. “I’ll expand my mind and do shows while I’m
here, then I’ll go to drama school when I finish.” To be able to do shows, I felt like I needed to major in something that didn’t require writing a thesis. I just wanted to take a blue-book exam. For some reason, history didn’t require a thesis so that’s what I chose. Then I took courses in everything historical I thought would expand my mind.
I finally knew what I wanted to do! For the next two and a half years I threw myself into acting. I started with shows at Harvard, but college drama departments are real cliquey. If you acted in the major plays, you were with the same people in every show; the same people got all the major roles. I decided to get off campus. I started doing all kinds of stuff—hand modeling, working with commercial agents and going to major theatrical organizations like the Boston Shakespeare Company and Theater-Works. From doing that, I started to meet a whole different circle of folks. I did an acting workshop in Boston, and our final showing was in front of the artistic director of the Boston Shakespeare Company. He invited me to become an apprentice with the company, and by my junior year I was a company member doing major roles in major plays like Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. I was a company member getting a small salary. I was a little acting machine. I finally knew what I wanted to do! So much for GM—I had a plan and I was working it!
Of course, the folks at Harvard didn’t know about any of these things. People never saw me at Harvard. I had disappeared. I would spend the night with Ahren or with my aunt in town, get up at 5:00 a.m. and ride my bike across the Charles River—rain, sleet, snow or shine—in time to do my work-study job, which was delivering New York Times, Boston Globe and Harvard Crimson newspapers to the students in Harvard Yard. I didn’t know the bus or the subway schedule; I was always on my bike. It was only by the grace of God that I didn’t fall under some bus wheels during a blizzard. I would deliver the papers to the kids living in Harvard Yard because it didn’t conflict with anything else. But I had to get there by 5:30 a.m.; if I got there late, the students would take my papers. And guess whose paycheck that had to come out of? From there I’d go to classes in the morning and rehearsals in the afternoon. I’d do shows and see Ahren at night. I got very little sleep but I was extremely excited and happy.
The summer of my sophomore year I returned to Detroit and worked at GM. On Sundays I was drawn to church. I went on my own. One time I was so moved by the service I walked down the aisle, ready to give my life to the Lord. But something held me back. “No, I’m not ready.” I turned around and walked out of the sanctuary. I would answer the Lord’s call at a later time.
During the summers of my junior and senior year Ahren and I auditioned and were accepted as members of Shakespeare & Company, a theater and festival in Lenox, Massachusetts. About fifteen students lived communally in stables that had been converted to apartments on The Mount, the estate of Edith Wharton, a twentieth-century American writer. In exchange for doing things like dusting the house, mowing the lawn, pulling stumps and laying down gravel, we got free acting classes. It was a wonderful exchange.
Shakespeare & Company’s approach presented a complete mind shift for me. Up to that point I thought acting was all about using different voices. I was good at that. Actually, I was becoming kind of arrogant about it. I thought we’d be learning about the intricacies of the text and iambic pentameter, the rhythm Shakespeare used for much of his work, which I thought was the next level. We didn’t do any of that. Instead, we were called on to use our emotions. I didn’t know anything about emotions—how to tap into them or use them. In fact, I had spent much of my youth hiding my feelings so I wouldn’t get teased. Once I learned that we had to explore them, I copped an attitude. “Why you gotta explore your emotions? What’s up with that?” I didn’t realize that sharing your emotions is what acting is all about. All I knew was that I was being asked to stand in front of a group of people I didn’t know and share personal things about myself. In one particular exercise, they wanted us to share two things about ourselves we wanted them to know and two things about ourselves that we didn’t want them to know. Where I came from, revealing any vulnerability—not to mention deep secrets—could subject you to relentless humiliation. But here, they didn’t want you to hold back; you had to reveal things. As my classmates shared, all kinds of things came up. Tears would suddenly start flowing because people were talking about things they’d never told anyone before. I thought, “You mean I’ve got to cry?” I said to myself, “Oh, Lord, that’s too much. I don’t know if I want to know that.” This kind of intimacy was extremely foreign to me.
My first summer at Shakespeare & Company I was out of my depth. “What does this have to do with acting? How does it apply to playing Shakespeare? Why can’t we just say the play?” In the meantime, it seemed like Ahren was having a great time. Unlike me, she had an ability to roll with things. She was free; she went with it. She took to the work like a duck to water. I was jealous of that and that I had to share her attention with my other fellow apprentices. “Wait a minute! That’s my girlfriend. What are you doing?”
“Courtney, we’re here with fifteen other people,” she’d tell me. “Stop trying to monopolize my time!”
I found living with all these people twenty-four hours a day way too intense. And the emotional work made my head feel like it was going to explode, like it was going to shatter! Once I snuck out of the stables in the middle of the night. I was so stressed out that I overcame my fear of the pitch black—we were deep in the woods; I was thinking “lions and tigers and bears!”—and felt my way tree-by-tree to the road. When I got there I shook a street sign to the ground and just howled and howled. When I was done crying and screaming, I walked the mile or so to back to The Mount, felt my way back through the woods to the stables and went to sleep. In class the next morning, while we were lying on our backs doing vocal exercises, one of my classmates said to me, “Did you hear that moose out there last night?”
My eyes got wide. Fortunately, we were lying down, so he couldn’t see them. “Yeah, man, I did hear that. That was wild, right?”
“Yeah, man.”
That scared me; I didn’t go out anymore after that. But I had done what I needed to do—scream.
I struggled in front of everyone all summer. It was frightening. It was agonizing. Eventually I had a breakthrough. As I was performing in the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, the emotion that was supposed to accompany my text suddenly flowed through me and I blew up the scene. Everyone said, “Oh, my goodness!” My performance was so compelling, and I’d overcome such a block, that they rushed toward me and lifted me up in the air. As I began to understand how to access and use my emotions, I became a different person. Suddenly, I developed a newfound confidence. I realized that I didn’t have to hide my emotions all the time. When I was confused or in pain, I could use them—I could put them into a scene. Knowing that was so very freeing; I was on top of the world with glee! At the end of the summer my family drove through Massachusetts on their way back from picking Cecilie up from her flight back from Germany, where she had been stationed for three years in the army. After her grades had dropped, she’d had to leave Michigan State. “Just pick which branch of the military you’re going into,” my father had told her, “because you’re not going to just sit around here.” Being in the army instead of college had taught Cee her lesson. She later graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Northeastern University in Boston.
During their visit with me they saw me carry a spear in the play Twelfth Night. My dad was thinking, “This is what you’ve been doing? Okay….” But I could tell he was proud of me.
By the next summer I received another grant to apprentice at Shakespeare & Company. I had become comfortable with my ability to let my emotions flow through the words, which is what the audience connects with and what makes a performance levitate. This gave me a way to channel emotions I was feeling but not expressing, personally. I just took off. I had discovered my gift and I was on fire! During that time I began to think more seriously about studyi
ng acting in grad school. My Shakespeare & Company voice teachers warned me to make sure it was what I really wanted to do. “Acting school is hard and very expensive,” they told me. “And three years is a long time to remain focused if the real reason you’re going there is to find an agent.”
Now that I was receiving praise for my work and felt a lot more like a real actor, my ego, which had already begun to blossom, really began to grow. That second summer I publicly criticized the performances of some of the professional actors in the program. “I don’t understand what they’re doing. Emotionally, they’re not doing anything.” Whether my comments were right or not was beside the point. Who was I but some college kid who had a gift he’d recently discovered? And where did I find the gall to publicly expose that the pros were struggling? Among the equity actors I became a pariah. Being so insensitive as to publicly embarrass people who were more accomplished than me was just one example of how I struggled in my personal life. I didn’t know how to deal with my feelings in life or in relationships. I didn’t have the tools, so I depended on Ahren. She was much more prepared for life than I. She could never be defeated; she always had a plan A, B and C. If something didn’t go my way, I didn’t have the tools to say, “Oh, well,” and shift gears. When it came time to come up with options, I would shut down. I didn’t know how to solve problems. Instead, I would just sulk; I would get blue; I would get moody. Ahren would think, “Oh, God. He’s down again,” and would navigate around me. But when I was feeling crazed, Ahren would calm me. “Courtney, you’re fine. It’s going to be okay.” She was my emotional center.
Come graduation that spring of 1982, I told my parents, “There are no awards. No big show. This isn’t going to be like Country Day. The things I’ve been doing, nobody knows about it—least of all, the Harvard community. So just come and let’s celebrate.” And celebrate we did!
Friends: A Love Story Page 8
