Friends: A Love Story

by Angela Bassett

  Now that, as a class, we had turned the corner and were on the “back nine,” educationally, we were no longer little young bucks. As a class we’d been through a lot. There were several cliques, several camps. We weren’t close. Now we had to come together to develop our scenes for the Leagues. While that was going on, I learned that Fences would be performed in Chicago at the Goodman Theater and Lloyd wanted me to reprise my role as Cory. Talk about an uproar among my classmates! But it was no big deal to me. I was a student; I knew I couldn’t be in it. No outside professional work—that was the rule. As far as I was concerned, that was all there was to it.

  What I didn’t know was that Lloyd had a very specific vision for the school. For years he had been developing playwrights at Yale, the O’Neill Theater Center and elsewhere, and perfecting a process by which their work would travel to Broadway by way of the regional-theater circuit—Yale Rep being foremost among them. At each stop on the regional circuit, the play would be deepened and perfected, and the regional theaters would be credited and compensated as producers once the play reached Broadway. Although playwrights from Athol Fugard to Lee Blessing would eventually journey this road Lloyd was paving, Lloyd began the process with August Wilson, who was black. Unlike most other playwrights of his caliber, August had a large enough body of work that the process Lloyd had envisioned could be repeated and perfected. In fact, August would eventually make that journey ten times with ten different plays to great acclaim (Fences was second). But it was Lloyd’s vision that August stepped into. So Lloyd—the play’s director and Yale drama school dean—made an exception: I would be able to perform in Chicago! Now my opportunity became not just a big thing at school but a big and openly divisive thing for Lloyd’s entire tenure. White students already resented the fact that because of Lloyd, black students were getting many opportunities at the Yale Rep, O’Neill Theater Center and in all of these new August Wilson plays—opportunities that hadn’t been open to them in the past. They were also envious because Lloyd was a master teacher but only performed administrative duties on campus, so none of them could be taught acting by him; yet a few black students were getting to perform in plays under his direction. And now the final salt in the wound was that this black student would be allowed to tour as a professional in a play in violation of school policy. The script had been flipped. People were hot—students and alumni alike! Ahren and I were caught in the middle.

  The Fences cast rehearsed in New Haven for about a month then traveled to Chicago, where I performed in the play for about a month. It was emotionally draining and difficult for me; I was working harder than I had ever worked in my life. At the same time I was having the time of my life. Chicago’s a great town, and by that time the cast and I had grown close and were like family. I was also learning life lessons from the play. When my character, Cory, was seventeen and about to graduate from high school, he got in a big fight with his father, Troy, played by James Earl, who kicked him out of the house. Cory then joined the marines, where he worked his way up to the rank of captain. He didn’t return home until seven years later, when he received news that his father had died. Cory returned home to tell his mother, Rose, played by Mary Alice, that he wasn’t going to attend his father’s funeral.

  “Son, you’ve got to go to his funeral,” she told him.

  “I’m not going,” Cory told her and ran down a list of his father’s shortcomings and how they had hurt him.

  “Your father wasn’t always right,” Mary Alice told Cory before acknowledging how hurtful some of Troy’s actions had been. “But that’s all you got to make a life with. You gotta find the good in him and take it then move on and make a life with it.”

  In the next scene Cory’s little sister, Raynell, who was seven years old and barely knew Cory, comes onstage. She asks, “You know that song Papa used to sing?”

  Cory starts singing, Had an old dog, his name was Blue / Ol’ Blue was mighty true / You know Blue was a good ol’ dog… Then she joined in and they sang a stanza together.

  “You know the song, too—he taught it to you, too?” Cory said. And though Raynell and Cory barely knew each other, that song became their connection. Through it, their father’s spirit lived on. And through singing the song with Raynell, Cory realized how much he missed his father and that he had to go to the funeral.

  Behind the scenes there was an ongoing disagreement about how to finish the play. The producer thought the play should end with Cory singing the song; August thought that the play should end, as written, with Gabe, Troy’s mentally ill brother, blowing his horn and opening up the gates of heaven so Troy can enter. They wouldn’t resolve the issue for a year or so. Yet the idea of looking for the good in someone and building upon it and letting the bad go, resonated with me and would remain with me for the rest of my life.

  Meanwhile back at the ranch, poor Ahren was getting whipped. She was completely in the middle. She caught all the drama from my classmates and had to hear about how much fun I was having. Plus, she had to do all her class work and walk Bottom morning, noon and night by herself. “Courtney, when are you coming back?” she’d ask me.

  On top of everything else, in my infinite wisdom, I decided to audition for a movie just to “stay sharp.” Richard Wright’s Native Son was being cast and they’d been looking all over the country for the actor to portray Bigger Thomas, whose character was a mixture of innocence and manliness. I walked in, did the audition and was told by the producer, “We have been auditioning all over the country for this role and, baby, it’s yours!” I was shocked! I went from being Bigger to being a baby again. “No, I’m not really even doing this. I’m in school,” I told the producer and director.

  “Well, this role is yours,” they told me. “You’d better call somebody so you can do it.”

  “Well, I gotta call my dean.”

  “Well, you better call him then.”

  My head was spinning.

  “Hey, Lloyd, guess what just happened?” I said to Dean Richards. “I just auditioned and I got this part. I mean, I was just auditioning to be auditioning. I didn’t think I’d get the role. I gotta go back to school.”

  He said, “Well, I think you know what to do. I’ll see you in a week back at school.”

  “Yeah, I know that’s what I gotta do. But since I don’t have an agent I just wanted to check in with you.”

  “Okay, see you Tuesday.”

  Then I called the casting director and said, “I can’t do it because I’ve gotta go back to school.”

  “You what?”

  “Yeah, I’m in school and as soon as Fences is over, I gotta go back and finish my third year.”

  “But this is your role! You can’t turn it down.”

  “Well, sir, I just did. I can’t do it. I gotta go back to school.”

  “If you turn down this role, you’ll never work again. Do you hear me! You’ll never work again in this town and you’ll never work in New York!”

  The man scared me real bad. I am so thankful that I had the presence of mind to tell him, “Talk to me in five years.” I hung up the phone. Then I ran over to Frankie’s apartment and told him what had happened.

  “Man, that was scary!” I told him.

  “But whoever gets that role, it’s gonna be good, Court!”

  “I know, but I’m going back to school.”

  “I know, so let’s go out and celebrate your decision!”

  I think that was on a Tuesday and Fences was closing on Sunday. In between I got a call from someone in the film(I don’t remember who) saying, “You’d better call your dean. There’s a way to work it out if you want to do the film.”

  “What!”

  I called Lloyd.

  “Courtney, go ahead and do the film,” he told me.

  “Huh?”

  “Sometimes there are difficult choices we have to make in life,” he told me. “This is one of them.”

  We talked a bit more and then we hung up. I didn’t know that the movi
e people had called many of the drama school alumni and given them the impression that Lloyd was pressuring me to return to school and not allowing me to do the role. In turn he hadn’t heard back from me, so he assumed I wanted to do the movie. Now I was back in limbo. Since my moral compass was shaky and I didn’t have the greatest problem-solving skills, I depended on other people. I depended on Ahren. I depended on Lloyd. I couldn’t depend on my parents because they didn’t know this arena. They said, “Court, this is what you want, isn’t it? You got a film!”

  “But, no, Mommy; I’m in school! I went there to finish and I’m half a semester away. That is what my dream was.”

  “What do you mean? I don’t understand….”

  At three in the morning, as I was in the middle of packing for the return trip to New Haven, I dialed up Frankie.

  “What should I do?”

  “Court, man, this is up to you. I can’t call it, brotha.”

  I sat in the middle of my hotel room floor with tears rolling down my face. I called Ahren not realizing my classmates were still hounding her: “When is he coming back? When is he coming back? The show is closing on Sunday. He’ll be back Tuesday, right?” Some of this was their resentment, but some of it was justified. They needed me to prepare for the Leagues scenes, where we partner up, choose scenes and then put a show together based on the scenes. It was the culmination of all our work, and for those folks who had gone to the drama school to get an agent, it was the most important acting opportunity of their lives. However, none of the scenes they were preparing could proceed without me.

  “Courtney, what do you mean ‘you don’t know what to do’? You’ve got to come back!”

  “But Lloyd told me—”

  “I don’t know what’s going on, Courtney. I can’t take this! I’m in the middle of all these people asking me what you’re going to do. These people are driving me crazy!”

  “Well, he’s telling me to do the movie. I’m going to do it.”

  “I can’t believe you, Courtney! I can’t believe you’ve done this.”

  I returned to New Haven a couple of days later. Ahren was a mess because she couldn’t take the pressure anymore. I tried to talk to her but she was in tears. “I don’t know you anymore….”

  That broke my heart—it broke my heart. I was struggling with the same question and didn’t have the emotional tools or support I needed to figure it out.

  “Ahren, I’m going to talk to Earle and work it out. There’s got to be a way to work it out.”

  “Okay, Court….”

  So I went to talk to Earle and explained the situation.

  “How am I going to deal with this? How can I work it out so I can do the movie and come back in the summer finish up my last semester? How can I do it?”

  He said, “Courtney, you can’t. You’re out.”

  “Whaat!” My lip trembled. My jaw shook. “I thought there was a way to work it out.”

  “Courtney, you can’t do a movie and come back. If you do the movie, you’re out.”

  “But what if I don’t do the movie?”

  “Did you sign anything?”

  “No.”

  “Well, if you didn’t sign anything then just call ’em and tell ’em you don’t want to do it.”

  “Can you call them as my representative? Somebody’s got to represent me. Somebody’s got to speak for me.”

  “All right,” he said, then turned around and picked up the phone.

  When someone on the other end answered, Earle identified himself and the situation and said, “He doesn’t want to do it,” then hung up the phone.

  “Finally, somebody has got my back,” I said, then broke down in tears.

  Earle took the flack for me for three days as a variety of people in the movie industry caused the phones in the dean’s office to ring off the hook. There were thirty to forty nasty messages left on our answering machine. They called my parents and threatened them. My mother took to her bed. Ahren and I had to get out of New Haven. We escaped to New York. After several days the furor died down. We returned home and by then they had recast the part. The movie, which starred Elizabeth McGovern, Matt Dillon and Oprah Winfrey, did poorly and disappeared.

  What Earle did in that moment was one of the greatest things anyone has ever done for me. I’ll never ever forget what he did in speaking up for me. Shortly after he stood up for me, Earle lost his voice. A lifetime smoker and a drinker, he developed cancer of the larynx and they took out his voice box and installed a mechanical device.

  When I returned to school the following week, everyone knew everything that had happened. Our voice teacher called a special meeting. She was the emotional center of our class. She said, “People need to say what they want to say and air out their feelings.” She moderated, but the whole class lit into me.

  “I just think that it’s unfair that…”

  “You just think that you’re better than everyone else.”

  “You’re getting special treatment because you’re black.”

  I just sat there and let them vent. Eventually I was given the chance to speak.

  “I was just auditioning to stay sharp. I didn’t think I would get the part.”

  “Oh, that’s what happened?”

  “Yeah, they gave it to me on the spot!”

  Why did I say that?

  “Everything you do just comes out right.”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s right that you’re just getting so much.”

  “Blah, blah, blah, blah…”

  Ahren came to my defense. “He just did what any of you would do. He merely went on an audition.”

  Eventually everyone hugged and cried and as a class we came back together. We came out of the experience energized and ready to prepare for the Leagues. And in spite of my public humiliation, I was glad to be back with my classmates.

  The Leagues didn’t go well for many of our classmates. On the train ride to New York everyone was very excited. The ride back was painful. Many people were devastated, knowing they’d never work again. Ahren and I had done well, however. We both got agents and were poised to go.

  Graduation from drama school was a blur. Shortly before the ceremony, Ahren stumbled across a long list of 1-900 phone calls on our phone bill.

  “What are these, Courtney?”

  At my birthday party a few months earlier, one of my friends had given me a present.

  “Here, Court,” he said, handing me a slip of paper.

  “What is it?”

  “Your birthday present.”

  I looked at it. It was only a number.

  “What is it?”

  “1-900-blah, blah, blah.”

  “But what is it?”

  “Call it up and see!”

  Later, I called.

  “Whaaat? This is crazy!”

  I started calling it all the time. I was on that telephone ten times a day. It was impersonal and it was safe. I had been calling them whenever I was feeling down. Now I was exposed. It was embarrassing. Everything I knew about pornography was that it was secret.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded. “You’re spinning out of control!”

  I knew it was wrong. But with my father hiding Playboys at home and telling me nothing about sex or relationships, I’d had no mooring on these issues. It was nothing, I told her. Just something a friend had told me about. I promised not to call them again.

  Making things worse, our moving-to-New-York money was almost gone because Bottom had developed bad skin and he needed expensive veterinary treatments. And the Native Son fiasco had put a serious strain on our fragile relationship. We were used to sharing each other with other people. But in the process we might have lost each other. In front of our parents we acted our way through it. They were just so happy. Their children were graduating from Yale. We were not just actors, we were Yale drama school graduates! But we were just hoping we could make it through the day. Behind the scenes we were asking: Should we stay togethe
r? Should we break up? Should we move to New York together? “I don’t know if it’s the right thing, but I don’t know what to do if I don’t go with you.”

  Chapter 5

  It’s C.P. Time

  Charles and I moved into the one-bedroom, fourth-floor walk-up apartment across from Central Park on 105th Street between Central Park West and Manhattan Avenue. Compared to where we lived in New Haven, the apartment was small. In the bedroom, there was only about one foot around the perimeter of the bed. The kitchen looked like an old Italian farmer’s kitchen with a big industrial sink. Roaches came out of the faucet—little baby roaches, not big palmetto bugs. I could deal with them; they weren’t big or as bad as the bugs I was used to in Florida. They just aggravated the hell out of me because they came out when company was over. Across the street was a raggedy, run-down, abandoned building. It had bats in the belfry. Now I think it’s a beautiful condo.

  At the time, I was twenty-four years old. I wasn’t looking to marry Charles, but we did have a relationship. Needless to say, my mother wasn’t happy about it. “Oh, you’re shackin’ up now,” she said about our living arrangements. I knew what I was doing fell outside the Bible and what I’d learned in church. But I was growing and exploring and figuring things out, so I lived with him anyway.

  As soon as we moved in, I scoured the New York Times and started talking to my friends from Yale and Negro Ensemble about what jobs were available. I got my first job out of the Times, booking spa services at Georgette Klinger Salon on Madison Avenue. Back then, Georgette Klinger was a big name in facials, salons and spas. There are a whole lot more salons and spas now, but back then she was it in New York City. For five days a week and one weekend a month, I worked in this little hallway with phone banks and huge schedule boards. We couldn’t wear pants even though we weren’t seen by the clientele. Folks would call and request a treatment from Ms. Galeana, Ms. Ivanca, Ms. This, Ms. That. The women were all from these European countries with one sister from Jamaica. To get to work I had to take two subway lines to get to the East Side, then walk a few blocks. I would start early in the morning and worked until six. In between, I’d get forty-five minutes for lunch and one ten-minute break. For that I got paid $225 a week, every other week. It was like slavery, but compared to some of the other women, I was doing well. I made more because I was an American. The Iranian girl who trained me made $200 a week for doing the same thing.