Friends: A Love Story

by Angela Bassett

  “How do you know it’s yours for sure?” I remember asking him.

  According to him, the woman decided to have an abortion. Yet one evening shortly thereafter, he came by and told me that I just wasn’t his ideal woman. It just wasn’t going to work out, he told me. I guess he was trying to let me down easy; while he was breaking up with me, he was almost crying. But by then I had decided he had a Casanova complex. We were still spending time, but I detached myself emotionally as I had done somewhat with Charles.

  “Can we still be friends?”

  “Oh, sure!” Anything to get him to go home. Silly me! I should have heeded the warning signs. At least I didn’t pine over him.

  Whether the relationship was romantic or platonic, other than Wren, whom I grew very close to and hung out with often as just a guy friend, I found it hard to find a man who had my best interests at heart. I like people for people, but out here I never knew what folks were looking for. Even with women I felt a little out of my element.

  “Hey, whatchu up to?”—that was the question I remember getting asked. Or “Whatcha doing? Working on anything?” If you work in the arts, people ask you those kinds of questions. They don’t ask you that if you work for Morgan Stanley or some insurance company, but when you’re in the arts: “Sooo, whatcha working on?”

  I never knew—and still don’t know—how to answer that question. I might not have been working on anything at the time, but maybe something was getting ready to come out, then they’d see what I’d been doing. But the work had been done a year ago. Did they want to hear about that? Or I was doing this, I was doing that, I was doing a lot of different things, but none of them was a feature film. Was working on an animation project as important as working on a feature film, and was that what they wanted to hear about? I didn’t know. Or maybe I’d be trying to get a movie made or was working on a documentary about AIDS in Africa. Do you really wanna hear about everything I’m working on? I hated the idea of defining my worth based on my work. And though some people’s motives were very nice, others were only trying to ascertain if I was up to something prestigious. So a lot of times I might say, “I’m working on being the best me I can be.” Or “I’m working on being happy.” Sometimes what I really wanted to say was, “I know what I’m doing. How are you doing?”

  Around 1990 I was offered the opportunity to audition for a role in a movie called Boyz N the Hood, written and directed by John Singleton, a recent University of Southern California film school graduate. John was going to cast it, and had producers and executives who were making the way smooth for him. I met him off Crenshaw Boulevard at Marla Gibbs’s Vision Complex. (She was way ahead of her time and had bought a theater, a jazz club and other buildings long before folks were thinking like that about that area of town.) John is about ten years younger than me. I remember thinking he was cordial and nice, and had these big puppy-dog eyes—real sweet, like he was enamored of you. I remember thinking he was just a baby.

  John and I talked about a lot of different things.

  “Who is your favorite poet?” he asked me.

  “Langston Hughes.”

  John liked Langston, too. We talked about him, and I believe I recited some poetry. He told me that Laurence Fishburne had already agreed to be in the film as the dad. I shared that Laurence was supposed to have been my love interest in Dessa Rose—until filmus interruptus. John and I got on well, and he cast me as the mom. Maybe something about me reminded him of his mom; the movie was semi-autobiographical. Once I got cast it was, “Here we go, Laurence! We didn’t get to make our last film, but here we are again.” In Boyz, we were playing love interests again—this time the estranged husband and wife with this son, this man-child, to raise.

  Knowing as much as I do about black folks’ struggles, sacrifices and accomplishments, I’ve always been extremely aware of the images put out there about us. I’m particularly conscious of images on film. Celluloid is permanent, the pictures are forever; they travel the globe and become the first depictions many see of black people. So I’m conscious of what I put out there about black folks. In the first place, there are too few images of black people, black women and people of color, in general. And some of the ones we see—have seen—are outlandish and hurtful. Sometimes that’s been because people did what they could with the opportunities they had at the time. Other times it seems it’s been because for some folks the entertainment industry is all about the dollar. It’s more important to make the money than to be dignified. The way I look at it, there needs to be a balance between laughter and dignity. There’s been enough of that other stuff; I want my portrayals to be positive. I want people to be uplifted by my work, to feel empowered, just as the images of black people I saw portrayed by James Earl Jones, Cicely Tyson, Rosalind Cash, Lonette McKee, Vonetta McGee, Sidney Poitier and others touched, inspired and represented possibility for me.

  I’ve also wanted my female characters to demonstrate their love of the black man. Our characters may not always get along, and our relationships may not work out, but, ultimately, I don’t want the characters I portray to ever malign or tear down a black man’s dignity or castrate him. So, as Laurence and I performed our scenes, I chose to add a little something in the moment—a little flavor—to my lines. Something like, “Oh, yeah, you fine but…”—admitting his character was undeniably attractive but that my character wasn’t going to allow that to come into play in the circumstances that faced us. Our relationship ain’t gonna work, but I ain’t blind, I do see you. Another actress might interpret those same lines like, “You ain’t shit.” I tried to lean toward, “This is not right, but let’s make it right.” I was glad John allowed me that opportunity—both to perform the role and to improvise. Boyz N the Hood did well at the box office and has become a cult classic. It was one of the first of what would later sometimes be referred to as the Boyz N the Hood genre.

  Similar issues about black images arose when I was cast in the role of Kathleen Jackson in the made-for-TV movie The Jacksons: An American Dream. After they sent me on the audition, my agents tried to talk me out of playing the role. People had begun to disparage Michael Jackson. They were saying that he seemed to be kind of off center, and his sister La Toya was crazy.

  “Oh, it’s just going to be a joke,” they said of the movie. “You shouldn’t be a part of it.”

  “Then why did you call me with an audition time?”

  I didn’t care what they said; I loved the Jacksons growing up and knew other black folks did, too. Plus, I wasn’t playing La Toya or Michael. “I’m playing they mama—Katherine Jackson—whom they love and revere. I think that’s a good thing to say in the world about mamas and they children,” I told my agent before accepting the part.

  While we were filming, I remember watching the kids who played the Jacksons as children. They were singing, dancing and acting and they had to go to school. They really had a lot to do. One young man, Wylie Draper, played the older Michael Jackson. Afterward, he developed leukemia and passed on. He lived his dream. He came to do what he was supposed to do. He was phenomenal to watch. The Jacksons aired in 1992 and got a forty share in the ratings, which is extremely good. My instinct about the role had been right!

  My next big movie I auditioned for was Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, where I tried out for the role of Malcolm’s wife, Betty Shabazz. Denzel Washington was playing Malcolm. Before the audition I remember reading everything I could about Malcolm and the Nation of Islam, trying to sop it all up. I slept in Malcolm X T-shirts that I’d bought on 125th Street in Harlem. I slept with the script under the mattress just to absorb by osmosis anything that would help me play the role and play it with respect and humanity for everyone to understand. This was not a character I was making up in my head from scratch, from the ground up. This was a real human being who was courageous and fragile and heroic and idiosyncratic. He and his family went through such a sacrifice. He sacrificed his family to the Muslims. Betty sacrificed her man to the world. They had
done more than most of the rest of us would have done. I felt a responsibility to bring my best self and not cheat them, and so did everybody else. Denzel was very protective of Malcolm. He had played him before in the stage play When Chickens Come Home to Roost, which was taped and shown on PBS. And now Denzel was playing Malcolm in the movie. He had come full circle with playing this character.

  A great deal of pride was demonstrated during the filming of that movie. Spike had done an incredible amount of research, and we were telling this story “by any means necessary,” as Malcolm would say. The making of the film included all sorts of tribulations. It had been hard to get it made in the first place, then at one point the money fell apart. Spike couldn’t get it from the studios, so he reached out to the black community and got it from people like Magic Johnson, Janet Jackson and other folk who had resources and wanted to make sure the movie was made. Until he got the infusion of funds, you didn’t hear anyone asking, “Is the check going to cash?” It was more, “We gotta tell this story.” It was a story we wanted to tell about ourselves, for ourselves. It was gonna get made. Nobody was going to discourage us or keep us from making it.

  On the set everyone was ready and organized and prepared. People were minding their p’s and q’s, working at their highest level and giving their best self. They might act like “crabs in a barrel” on other occasions, but not at that moment. A lot of time is wasted on a movie set. There is a lot of joking and fooling around. This time we had fun, but nobody “skated” or gave less than two hundred percent on anything. We spoke to each other differently—“Brother This” and “Sister That”—out of respect and love. It felt like I would imagine it did during the civil rights movement when black folks had a common cause, a common fight. We carried ourselves with the dignity and poise you see among many members of the Nation. We might as well have been in it—we behaved like it; we read everything we could about it. I remember going to Ferncliff Cemetery, near Hartsdale, New York, where Malcolm is buried. Spike introduced us to this Malcolm aficionado we could spend time talking to; he had so much information about Malcolm and the period. There was even a tape of the moment that Malcolm was shot.

  Because we were going to film Malcolm’s assassination, I listened to the recording. It was haunting. I could hear Betty’s wail, her cry. After listening, I was able to grab hold of the pain and re-create the scene. I knew that after he was shot she was on her knees behind the podium holding his head in her lap. I remember we rehearsed it once. It was important to me to get this scene right—to know what Betty must have felt while watching her husband killed in front of her eyes. Murdered. Assassinated. With a baby in her stomach and two little babies at her side. They saw it also. Just the idea of that would make me crazy. I could understand if someone didn’t want to go on or if they lost their mind. I wondered how she found the strength to keep going, to raise her family, to educate, to sustain them. Without the support of the community that Coretta Scott King had had, since back then so many people viewed the Nation as a cult over on the side.

  During that rehearsal in the Audubon Ballroom and Theater in Harlem, I knelt on the ground, in costume, off to the side. Denzel came by. Denzel puts every fiber of his being into his work. He’s undeniable. Unquestionable. I asked him, “Would you just put your head in my lap? Will you just let me look at you and take it all in—husband assassinated, wife pregnant—and let whatever emotions wash over me? Will you let me see what it does to my senses, to my body, to my spirit, to my emotions?” And with all that he had to do—with everything he had on him to carry that movie, Denzel was very gracious and agreed. The environment was so loving and open and professional—above and beyond.

  At one point while we were filming, the issue came up again of how I was going to handle conflict between a black woman and a black man. Betty says something like “hush” or “shh”—“shut up”—to Malcolm. And I remember Denzel asking, “How are you going to say that?” He wanted to know my character’s intentions. Was I going to have Betty dog him out? “SHH!”—“Shut the hell up!” I could have said if I, as an actress, chose to take it there. Or was I going to choose a sweet way of saying the line, like there’s a sweet way of saying nigger? Of course I chose sweet.

  On the personal side it was nice to be back in New York while we were filming. I got to see my family, go to the theater at night, reconnect with old friends, walk places and take the subway. My aunt Lorraine (my mother’s sister) introduced me to a guy named Joe, who served on some board with her up in Harlem. We started dating. Joe was really nice, bright, well educated and came from a good family. I thought he was a great catch. He was a lawyer and had an easygoing personality, though practicing law didn’t really seem to be his thing; he was more entrepreneurial—opening a restaurant, a travel agency, an ice-cream parlor. He also had strong ideas about what he thought was important. He liked to fast once a week and one weekend a month, and wanted me to do it with him. In the beginning of our relationship, I would think, “Okay, but damn, I’m hungry.” By the time the weekend was over, I would be eating cookies, drinking soda, orange juice—anything I could get my hands on. Later on, I would tell him, “But I don’t want to fast.” He tried to twist my arm, but I wasn’t into it. Still, he was a good guy, and after the filming of Malcolm ended and I returned to L.A., we continued to date long distance. That meant I would return to New York periodically. On one trip it seemed like everyone on the subway was reading Terry McMillan’s novel Waiting to Exhale at the same time.

  Shortly after I returned to Los Angeles, I got a call for an audition for a movie based on I, Tina, the memoir of Tina Turner, which had been published about a year earlier. I had not read the book but I certainly knew Tina Turner. Everyone knew Ike and Tina, just like we knew Nancy Wilson, Diana Washington, Lou Rawls and the people who sang all the other classic music your parents played on the stereo. I could sho’ ’nuff sing some “I’d rather sleep in a hollow log….” My audition was with casting director Ruben Cannon. Ruben had his own business, Ruben Cannon & Associates. In a sense he had had to audition for his job just like I had to audition for I, Tina. Ruben’s role was to keep up with the talent pool, to know who was dependable, who was most right for a given role, to find the talent that would make the director happy. He didn’t have the power to say, “Yes, you have the job,” but he could say, “No, you can’t meet the director.”

  I went to Ruben’s office and presented myself as a fresh, clean face—a blank canvas—not a lot of makeup. I wanted him to see me as Tina; I have eyes shaped like hers, I have full lips like her, I have brown skin like her, I have hair…Well, you can make hair look like anything; I chose to pull mine back into a ponytail. I wore a simple shift—a spaghetti-strapped, knee-length, A-line dress with an abstract yellow, tan and beige design. You could see my arms, my legs, my calves. You could see that I was fit—not big, not small.

  When I walked into the room, there was Ruben, the desk and me. And there were résumés everywhere, just boxes and boxes of pictures on the floor. I had the definite feeling that everyone—even if they didn’t have an agent—wanted to be part of this film. After I entered the room, Ruben opened the blinds and window. Then he picked up a CD of Tina—one with her wearing an Afro. He held the CD out in front of him, sort of looked at it, then he looked me. He looked at it. He looked at me. Then he said, “You can audition. I’m going to let you audition for the director.” That was it. I guess my strategy worked. I resembled her in a way and he could see from my résumé that I was working. I had done quite a bit of television movies and episodic dramas. I had also done Boyz N the Hood and that had done well. I had just played Katherine Jackson. That had done very well. And I had a Yale drama degree. I was hopeful that it would help me in this weeding-out process, and it did.

  For the audition with the director, I was not able to read the whole script beforehand. At some point I did, though, and I knew it needed a lot of work. It opened on the banks of the Nile River with a cloudy-eyed old lady doin
g a fortune-teller, guru, all-knowing kind of thing, reading baby Tina’s fortune. When I read it, I thought, “What the heck is this?” I’m certain I was given several sides, individual scenes a couple of pages long. When you get sides you try to imagine the context: Who am I? Where am I? What’s going on in my world? Sometimes it’s clear from what’s written; other times it’s not, but you have to make perfect sense of whatever you’re given. If you’re lucky you hit it on the nose, but you could also be way off the mark.

  This situation seemed pretty clear: Ike and Tina had a relationship. In one scene she tells him that maybe they should do another kind of music. Her comment gets his ire up. She starts backpedaling and apologizing, then a fight breaks out. The scenes weren’t long but they were intensely emotional. You know how a car might go from zero to sixty in ten seconds? Well, these scenes went from zero to sixty in what felt like three seconds. You had to turn on a dime, from peaceful and serene, everything’s okay to—Pow!—getting the crap beat out of you. From calm to where you’re fighting, scared for your life. Fortunately, I knew how to do that from my role as Martha Pentacost. I called on that experience as I prepared.

  I came to the audition with my same blank-canvas look. I couldn’t look like her any more than I did. Maybe I could have done my hair like hers, but that would be trying too hard. Even then, I needed to lose a few pounds, I wasn’t a dancer, I couldn’t sing. (Fortunately, there was no singing in the sides and she was going to redub the songs, do fresh recordings.) What was called for was acting. I sat alone in the anteroom. That was good. Most times when you arrive at an audition, you usually have to wait in a waiting room with other actors. “Hi, how are you? What have you been doing lately?” Ugh! Or maybe one of the actors is talking to the receptionist. “How’s so and so been?”—the insider thing—and your insecurities kick in. She knows them. You’re thinking, They like her; she’s a shoo-in. Or maybe someone starts talking to you and engaging you—perhaps they haven’t seen you in a long time or they’re gregarious or giving you nervous, mindless conversation. Maybe how you relax is by going over your lines or sitting quietly—but you can’t because someone is giving you conversation, conversation, conversation. You can’t step outside to get away from them because you don’t want to miss your turn.