Friends: A Love Story

by Angela Bassett

  I would go to auditions on my forty-five-minute lunch break. Oh, Lord, the stress! Oh, the tears! I’d come in and my agent would call and say, “You have an audition at 3:20 p.m.” Then I’d ask Ms. Whoever was the head of the phone bank—she was always well coiffed, white-blond hair, little glasses, very sophisticated-looking—I’d say, “I would like to take lunch at three today.” It would usually take around twenty minutes to get to the audition. Going downtown was one thing, but if I had to walk crosstown about two or three avenues, that’s where the stress came in. And you’d get there and, of course, your audition would be running behind. If I was lucky, it would only be five or ten minutes behind. Sometimes it would be a half hour. There were so many times when I was late returning to work.

  “You are late! You’re late. Coming back late is unacceptable. Blah, blah, blah,” Ms. Coiffed would scold me. But she knew what I was doing; nobody else who worked there was trying to be an actress. They knew this was my survival gig—a means to an end. Later that day the same Ms. Coiffed would tell me, “Oh, Angela, you are going to be a big star!” It was very schizoid. She’d chastise me on the one hand then praise me on the other. It was too much stress—all this trying to get to the audition, get back in time, missing the audition because I got there late, having to leave the audition early or rush through it so I could get back to work without getting reprimanded, then later that day get applauded because “one day, you’re going to be a star!” Depending how I was feeling that day, I would fuss under my breath or go into the bathroom and cry. Sometimes I’d feel very discouraged. I’d wonder, Is it ever going to happen? Am I ever going to get a chance to be an actress? Will I remember what to do if I finally get a job?

  Meanwhile, Roc wasn’t working; he was auditioning. He just didn’t have that sort of coordination where he could focus on more than one thing. Even though he’s a people person, I don’t think he would have been any good at waiting tables or anything like that. He’d be talking and you’d still be waiting for your food. He was good at what he was good at, and that was acting. So he and another buddy, Reggie, put together a cabaret show at the West Bank Café. On weekends at 11:00 p.m. or later, they would perform scenes they’d made up then split the door—whatever the door was—with the establishment. He’d give me about twelve dollars a week. Well, that was the electric bill—at least it was something. But the rent still had to be paid. For a while all that responsibility fell on my shoulders.

  One day someone told me that U.S. News and World Report was looking for an assistant. I was hired on the spot. At U.S. News I had one boss and one little desk. My job was to pull Associated Press, United Press International or Sigma photos to accompany the articles. I’d present a selection to my boss, he’d identify which ones would run and I’d compile them and send them by FedEx to the main office in Washington, D.C. Sometimes we’d run late and I’d have to take a plane to D.C. to hand them in. That was kind of exciting. And now when I’d get calls for, say, an eleven-thirty audition at ten, I could tell my boss and he’d say, “Oh, leave now and prepare.” He understood that I was an actress and this job was just a stop on the way. I did my work. He let me go. It wasn’t like a pressure thing. I was so happy.

  One month after starting at U.S. News—it was the spring of 1984—I got my first job, as the understudy for Colored People’s Time performed by the Negro Ensemble Company. C.P. Time, as I called it because I didn’t like to say “colored people,” was a series of vignettes throughout history strung together, ranging from slavery to a Billie Holiday-ish character singing to the troops. When I called my mom to tell her I’d gotten this role, she was excited. She then told me what came to be the signature advice for every role I won: “Work hard and be nice!” At first I was trying to do both U.S. News and Negro Ensemble, but before long my boss told me, “Angela, it’s not going to work out with the rehearsal schedule and working.” I started crying. In that short period of time the company had been so good to me, allowing me to prepare and go into auditions confident enough to get the job. Then I shook myself—Isn’t this what you went to drama school for?—thanked everyone and headed out the door. Being selected to join the theater company I’d written my thesis about—a theatrical group with such an important legacy in the black community—was a tremendous honor I didn’t take lightly. I was very aware that I was following in the footsteps of Ensemble alumni like Lorraine Hansberry, who wrote A Raisin in the Sun, which I performed a monologue from when I was a child, as well as people like LeRoi Jones, Louis Gossett Jr. and Phylicia Rashad. I knew God had given me a gift. I intended to care for it.

  As understudy for C.P. Time, I had to learn all three women’s parts. That included singing, which I was not happy about. Singing always made me nervous. I consider mine an average voice; I don’t think I can carry a tune all the way through. Of course, I grew up in the choir and was in gospel choir at Yale as a young adult. But to sing solo, no accompaniment, no choir—just you and your voice? I had never done that. In drama school I took a singing class and had to sing one song. I chose “Love for Sale” and never sung it to my teacher’s or my satisfaction. I should have picked an easier song and worked on it and worked on it and worked on it. But I like to complete things and move on. So my confidence in that area was nil.

  One girl I was covering was a real singer—Carol Maillard, one of the original members of Sweet Honey in the Rock, the Grammy Award-winning black, female a cappella ensemble. She was real encouraging and worked with me and taught me how to sing-talk a little bit. That worked out. You’re playing a character and maybe the character doesn’t have a voice like a canary. She sings okay but she’s playing it, she’s entertaining the troops. I also understudied L. Scott Colwell, one of the original members of Home, and Ahren Staunton, who came out of Julliard the year before me. Samuel L. Jackson and Charles Weldon were also in the play. I knew each of the women’s parts “off book”—I knew them by heart. I didn’t mess around. I studied the women, the inflections, their tones, their ways, how they played the scene. I was able to go on for any one of them at a moment’s notice. Of course, none of them missed a beat. They might be late to the theater and I’d think, “Yeah!” ready to go on, but then they’d show up. Except Carol. Once she got sick and couldn’t go on for two performances. I would get weak in the knees, play the part, then come off the stage and fall onto my knees.

  After we ended our run in New York, we traveled around New England, Pennsylvania, New York State, New Jersey and Ohio on what they call a “bus and truck” tour. We’d ride on the bus, get to the place, do the show, finish at ten-thirty, get a bite to eat, maybe see the town, get in bed and check out at 9:00 a.m. Sam called me the “rack queen” because I could curl up and make the bus seats look like a queen-size bed. One of the guys in the cast was always giving me the eye. “Hey, girl, why don’t you come over here and sit on my lap.” I played it off for weeks. Then one day I couldn’t take it. I shouted, “I am not a piece of meat!” in front of everyone else. He was stunned. I mean, I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone’s feelings, but I wasn’t interested—he was married! After that he stopped talking to me completely. At some point during our trip L. Scott schooled me, “The code of the road is silence”—meaning, that for the two or three months that you’re doing regional theater, you’re gone, you do things, you see things and then you come back home to your life. “Oh!” Today they say, “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.”

  One day I approached the guy who had been hitting on me and said, “I’m just a mean ol’ heifer, ain’t I?”

  “Well, I dunno. You know, you kinda, you know…I don’t wanna mess with you…”

  “I’m not really mad at you. I was just, like, getting tired of you pressin’ me with that song.”

  After that we were real cool.

  While we were on the road, Charles was back in New York and had been offered a role in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, a play by an up-and-coming black playwright named August Wilson. Although we weren’t aware
of it at the time, opportunities for black actors were about to open up. We would ride the crest. Ma Rainey had premiered at Yale Rep while we were in school. Now that it would be hitting the regional circuit, Charles was cast in it. To prepare himself, he had to travel up to Yale for rehearsals. After it toured, the play made it to Broadway, which was a pretty incredible experience for someone a year out of drama school. Ma Rainey was phenomenal and Charles was phenomenal in it. Now, Charles didn’t play the trumpet, he wasn’t a musician. But his character, Levee, played the trumpet, so the boy learned to play the trumpet and brought it to life. He was really amazing! I have to give it to him—Charles was undeniable!

  Once Ma Rainey hit Broadway, Charles had officially been introduced to the theatrical community. He isn’t waiting tables or working at Georgette Klinger’s; he’s doing the play and life is lovely! After the performance, admirers would invite him out for dinner or drinks. And let me tell you, when folks who can afford to pay for dinner and a ticket to go to the theater are feting you, it can get very heady. It was a wonderful time, a very attractive time. I’d laugh and tell him, “Oh, you’re just a fat rat in a cheese factory.” It was also the time when our relationship started to get strange.

  On Broadway a play typically starts at 8:00 p.m. You get there early, you’re finished by 10:30 p.m., you may grab dinner or a drink or meet some admirers afterward, and then you’re done. While Charles worked, I’d be up in the roach-infested apartment waiting for him to get home. At first he’d come in at maybe two in the morning. That was okay ’til it got to be night after night after night. After a while I would tell him, “What the heck is going on here? I ain’t your roommate, I ain’t your secretary, I ain’t your mama and I ain’t your sister.” Of course, Charles always had an excuse—this person or that person wanted to take him out. He had always been good at making something sound halfway believable and leaving you questioning yourself—of making you think that ol’ jelly jar was a Ming dynasty vase. But it got to be where he said he had to be gone at odd times during the day and night. Or he’d come in at four in the morning. Or he’d be gone for two days at a time. He’d tell me stories, like he had to go up to Yale. Or he was using his producer Fred Zollo’s apartment because he was writing a play about the life of Ira Aldridge, the African tragedian. Now, he really was into Ira Aldridge at the time; he was reading his biography. But I wasn’t sure that I bought his story that he was working at Fred’s because our little funky, too-small, fourth-floor, roach-infested apartment wasn’t conducive to writing. Especially when he couldn’t give me Fred Zollo’s number or tell me where his apartment was. Things were sounding mighty unusual.

  There were many times I wanted to break up with Charles, beginning at around that year-and-a-half mark. Instead, I allowed our relationship to stretch on for something like three years. When it was good, it was really good. We’d go to plays together, the movies or his mom’s house in Baltimore, and she’d make crab boil and we’d hang out. We had a lot of fun, and I have to admit it felt nice to be connected with someone people held in such high regard, and to be part of this held-in-high-regard team. But I wasn’t as strong as I could have been in insisting upon my standards. I spent a lot of time wondering, Hmm…is he telling the truth? I’m not sure. Is this the truth? Is that the truth? Is it a lie? A lie mixed with some truth? Let me suss it out. I also thought I could fix him and that he needed me to take care of him. I’d think, Oh, this poor thing. He can’t even wash his clothes without turning everything pink. Or, Poor thing, he can’t cook. Or, Poor thing, he can’t pay the bills. I’d tell myself, I guess I have to put up with this unsavory part of it. Other times I just wanted company. I was new to New York City, working in a tenuous profession. I needed someone familiar.

  One of our major problems was that Roc could be insanely jealous. He couldn’t stand the friendship I had with a guy named Bill, who’d been my friend since freshman year. He wanted me to end it.

  “What are you seeing Bill for—are you fucking him?”

  “Hey, you’d better back up,” I’d tell him. “Bill is my friend, and I ain’t never letting him go. Now you? You can go. But I am not letting my friend go.”

  Then he would back off and wouldn’t mess with me about Bill. But if I met a guy I wanted to have a friendship with, I’d have to call him; I didn’t want him calling the apartment. Though Charles was jealous of Bill, who wasn’t a threat, he failed to detect the threat of a fellow actor I did some work with in New York. Then again, maybe he wasn’t much of a threat—the man was about eighty! I really liked him as a person. But one day when I was at his apartment for some reason, he said, “Angela, let’s take advantage of each other.” I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but I thought You’d be taking advantage of me. I don’t see what advantage I’d have. His hair was as white as snow. I knew there would be gray hair—oh, never mind! I thought it was funny. I got out of there as quickly as I could. He died shortly thereafter. Thankfully it wasn’t in my arms.

  After a while, my relationship with Charles became habit, just habit. I got used to it even though it was dysfunctional. At one point things became so bad I would tell myself, “If I just mark an X on the calendar on every day we have a fight, the whole month would be blacked out; there would be more black days than clear days.” I developed a way of working within it. We fussed, we fought, we made up and were happy. Then it started all over again. The highs were high and the lows were low. This is my boyfriend, I thought. This is how it is for now. It’s not going to last forever.

  In the spring of 1985 Charles got nominated as Best Featured Actor for a Tony, the annual award celebrating achievements in theater. We were all excited. I asked, “I should go get a dress, right?”

  “I dunno, I dunno. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I might take my mama.”

  “Oh, you’re going to take your mom. Oh, okay…” I figured I’d watch the ceremony on TV.

  The night of the Tonys, one of my dear friends, Michael Knight, a director in drama school, and his mentee, James, came and watched the show with me. When the nomination for best actor came, we were all psyched up. The camera panned to Roc wearing his white ascot and suit. I thought he’d have been smiling, but for some reason he was looking real tight, tense—it looked to me like he had a hot poker up his ass. I wondered why. Then the camera panned over some more. I saw this really pretty woman in a gold dress sitting next to him. She was smiling. She looked happy and proud. She seemed to be excited. But she darn sure wasn’t his mama! Behind them, Jim Simpson, our director friend from school, was also smiling. But Roc wasn’t smiling. I guess he was saying to himself, “This obviously ain’t my mama, so I guess she knows now.”

  I was just stunned. “Ohmygosh!”

  There it was as plain as the nose on my face. My intuition had been right.

  “And the winner for Best Featured Actor is…Barry Miller for Biloxi Blues!”

  “Yeah! Uh-huh. See!” I hollered at Charles through the TV. “God don’t like ugly and he ain’t too fond of cute!”

  I felt terrible, I felt so embarrassed. Everyone in New York’s black acting community knew we were together. And now he had humiliated me.

  “I don’t believe it—on national TV!”

  Fortunately, I had my boys there to comfort me. I collected myself and called up his mama; she liked me. I was the girl who had put the money in the Bible and who had paid the rent and who was making sure the roof was over our heads and the lights were on. Now it was payback time.

  “Hey…”

  “Oh, my God!” she said and started crying. “Aw, my God, Angela. You’re just so nice and you’ve always been so good.”

  “Look,” I said, getting right to the point. “The rent is due and I don’t know where he is. Where is he?”

  “Here is her phone number.”

  “Okay.”

  So I waited until about 8:30 a.m. the following morning. He picked up the phone half-asleep.

  “Hullo…”

&
nbsp; “Hey!” I put on my nice “Julia” voice.

  “How’d you get this number?”

  “Oh, don’t worry about it. I’ve had it for a while. Anyhow, the rent is due.”

  “Okay, I’ll bring you a check.”

  “All right, have a great day. Bye!”

  Click.

  And he gave me the check, too, for about three months rent or something. He’s always been generous—that’s one good thing I can say. But then everyone was walking around looking at me, staring at me. And people I hardly knew were saying to me, “Oh, God, it was terrible, terrible, terrible.” That was the worst part of it.

  Now, you would think that would have ended our relationship, but we still kept dealing with each other in some kind of way—him going back and forth. He ain’t really gone, but he ain’t really with me.

  He would ask me, “You wanna break up?” probably hoping I’d say yes.

  I’d say, “Y-y-y…no….” Then we’d go on a little longer, then a little bit longer than that.

  I remember praying, “Lord, if it ain’t meant to be, please kill it—and end it in such a way that I won’t go back, ’cause I ain’t strong enough. So, Lord, really end it good. Let me know.” By then I was getting regular work and starting to think I could make it on my own. I remember appearing on a couple of episodes of Cosby, which was a big deal at that time.