Friends: A Love Story

by Angela Bassett

  “They’ll roll with it, Conroy. If they have to come out of those schools, they’ll get over it and be fine. You’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do.”

  “No, I can’t do that to them.”

  I don’t know how my dad’s troubles affected my parents’ marriage. Dad and I didn’t talk like that, and Mom confided to Cec about that kind of stuff. She and I didn’t have that kind of relationship. As much as we loved each other, in our family everyone was an island. But it was obvious to me that “all was not well in Denmark.” In a marriage it takes two to tango, and it was clear that after thirty-five years, there had been a lot of pain, disappointment and “dreams deferred.” My father and mother had been quietly struggling for a number of years.

  Ahren and I were struggling, too. I’d started calling 1-900 numbers again. These days things have progressed to Internet porn, but back then a lot of men were into these porn “talk lines.” Whenever I felt lonely, I’d pick up the phone. Between the images I’d seen in my father’s magazines and what the women on the other end of the phone would say, it created a gulf in our relationship. She had started to go to therapy and wanted me to go, too.

  “I don’t need to see nobody. I’m fine,” I’d say. “What do you need a therapist for?”

  And she kept wanting us to talk about our relationship and my problem with pornography.

  “What do you mean?” I’d ask her. “Things are fine.”

  “But, Courtney, what are we doing? Where are we going?”

  “What are you talking about? We’re good. Let’s keep going like we are.”

  “There are a lot of things we need to discuss and figure out.”

  “Ahren, I’m tired,” I’d tell her. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to connect with her. I didn’t know what it was that she wanted. We were thirty now—we weren’t kids anymore—but how we dealt with each other hadn’t changed. I didn’t have the tools to talk about stuff that mattered or deal with difficult conversations, like “When are we getting married?” which everyone seemed to ask us. We never, ever discussed the subject. I wouldn’t allow it. I didn’t have the tools to deal with either Ahren’s or my parents’ emotions. What I did have the tools to deal with was work. There was safety in work. So I focused on it. I needed to; I hadn’t mastered my role yet and being onstage was very stressful for me. I had lost my usual ten to fifteen pounds, I was always tired, constantly tired.

  One day in December 1990, I was still in bed trying to get as much sleep as possible in order to deal with my two-show Wednesday, when my mom called.

  “Your dad—he’s not waking up!”

  “Ma, what’s wrong?”

  “Your dad—he just…”

  She was hysterical. Absolutely hysterical!

  “He’s dead, Courtney. He’s dead. He shot himself!”

  “WHAT?”

  I didn’t know what to do or say. There are five stages of grieving. I was in the “shock” stage. Everything became a blur. I remember telling Ahren. She was a mess. We had been together for a long time and it was like she was part of my family—my parents were like her parents.

  “Go home, Courtney,” she told me.

  I also remember thinking, “I gotta call Stockard and tell her.” Until that point I had taken no days off. A part of me was afraid to leave the show. It had been hard to get the role in the first place, and it had been such a difficult part for me to learn. Stockard, John and I had this rhythm together. Any one of us stepping out would throw all the others off. But I knew I had to go home. Stockard was very supportive. “Go home. We’re gonna be fine. You take care of yourself.”

  Now, after thirty years of successfully avoiding emotional issues in my personal life, I had to deal with the most intense emotions a person can have—and all at once. Throughout my whole life there was a door my father wouldn’t open; consequently, we didn’t try to go in there. But now the issues were front and center. There was no way to avoid it. There was no escaping.

  I flew home to Detroit. When I arrived, Mom told me that Dad had been violently depressed. His mood swings, she said, had been incredible—a lot of highs and a lot of lows. I believe she knew he was on Prozac. I’m not sure how much else she knew. Later, we would discover he had been working with five or six different therapists, leaving one to go to another. Not going when he was supposed to. Maybe trying to find the right one. Maybe feeling that none of them were right for him. To get coverage he had to stay in his HMO. He was so secretive he probably resisted the emotional sharing that counseling involves. Being a black man in the 1980s. And proud. And ashamed of the stigma. And depressed.

  According to my Mom, Dad’s foster father had kept guns in his home. My father had inherited them back in 1984 when he had settled his father’s estate. Mom had told my father, “Get those guns out of here. Get those guns out of my house!” But later she discovered one or two still lying around. It was like he had been gathering up the courage for a long time—he’d been gearing up.

  The funeral. It was held at a funeral home. I was kind of out of my body. Our folks came in from all over. My family is full of really intelligent people—Harvard, Brandeis Yale—very educated, and at the same time silly, funny and goofy. They played the “dirty dozens,” cracking on each other all the time. They’d tell jokes close to the bone, up on each other, but with love behind it. My dad had been the life of the party. The center of it all. Everybody was ripped. This was the last thing folks would have expected. Nobody knew what to do or say.

  My grandfather pulled me aside. “People gonna try to tell you that what he did was a terrible thing. That he’s a coward. Don’t you believe none of that. Your daddy was very unhappy and it’s a blessing you had him as long as you did. Your daddy was a great man.”

  “Thank you, Granddad.” I appreciated what he said. But I wasn’t quite sure what he was talking about. I wasn’t churched. I didn’t realize there is a biblical prohibition against killing oneself. It didn’t occur to me to be embarrassed.

  Everybody spoke. Emotionally, my sister was just gone. Everybody waited for me—“Baby Boy.”

  “You gotta say something, Court.”

  When I got up to speak, I said, “I don’t care. I don’t know what people will say about him. I don’t know what they’ll think about him. All I know is, that man was my father!” Then I broke. It was all I had to say. Later I would hear the same line—“All I know is that man was my father”—recited in the movie The Road to Perdition. My father was the greatest man I’ll ever know. A mixture of all the things I want to be. During this time I would remember the advice Rose gave to Cory in Fences. “You have to take the best of what was in your father and move on. That’s all you have to make a life with.” While he was here, my father was the best father any son could ever have. He was always there, always teaching, always there to support me. Although he wrestled and eventually succumbed to his demons, through the way I walk this earth, I’m attempting to “take the best he was able to give me and go on and make a life.” If I could do that, I would honor him and the vision he had for me, Cecilie and our mother.

  Our family bent hard. We didn’t break. But we sunk all the way down to the bottom of the well. After the funeral I stayed home for a month. The weeks after were a blur. Where’s Daddy? Why did he do it? Was he mad? Was he mad at Mommy? What will I do without him? So many emotions were swirling within me I didn’t know where to place them. I was mad. I was so upset. How could he do this to us? How could he do this to Mom? She is such an innocent person. All she does is love. All she wants to do is help. “Can I help? What can I do, Court? Let me help.” She’s one of those kinds of people. That’s where I get it from.

  One of my most vivid memories of those days after Daddy’s death is of my mother trying to put a video in the VCR. My parents followed very traditional gender roles. Dad did the VCR. Mom wanted to watch a tape, but realized that she couldn’t figure out how to work the machine. She broke down in tears and crumpled onto the gr
ound.

  “I don’t even know how to work the VCR….”

  “Oh, Mom…”

  “Why would he do this? How could he do this to me?”

  Seeing my mother broken like that was just devastating. She was at rock bottom. I had never seen her like that before.

  My mother, sister and I came together during those painful weeks. We cried, we got angry, we laughed and remembered the good times. Everyone was very emotional and in a fit of misdirected rage, Cecilie and I almost came to blows.

  “Cecilie, what are you going to do? I’m bigger than you now. You gonna hit me?”

  We were entering the second stage of grieving: anger. Since Daddy wasn’t around, we directed it at each other.

  “Okay, now we’re going to fight? You wanna fight? Oh, Lord…”

  “What are you two doing?” my mother shouted. “You only have each other. Eventually, I won’t be here. You’ll be all you have left. You have to learn to get along!”

  At that point we broke down and we all started sniffling and crying and hugging. It was a defining moment. No one wanted to fight. We were just hurt and lashing out. Together, we got in there together and dealt with our feelings. We’ve been tight ever since.

  While we were home, Cec and I went down and cleaned out the basement. One part of us felt, “Let’s get this stuff out of here,” because we were mad. Another part thought, “We’re only going to be home for three weeks. We’ve got to do this before we go. We can’t leave it for Mom.” My mother said, “Go ahead and do it. If something comes up you think he might have wanted me to keep, you let me know.”

  We went through my dad’s things together. He was so secretive, we wondered, “What are we going to find?” After knowing so little about my father’s personal life, now to have to go through his belongings and to possibly learn what he thought—it was too much! I didn’t want to know whatever we might find. I definitely didn’t want to stumble across a suicide note. It was just too personal. These things were him; they were her. Fortunately, we didn’t find anything like that. I did stumble across a letter my father had written to his foster father, describing the scenario when I had the presence of mind to go racing home when Cecilie’s head had gotten caught between the jungle-gym bars. “I’ve never been prouder of my son than I was today,” the note said. It filled my heart to know that that was a defining moment for him. But most of what Daddy had was on his computer, which was so intricately password protected, it was locked up. We never really got in there.

  We did discover one thing that broke our hearts. Daddy had ten credit cards that were charged up to the max. He’d been pulling from this one to pay that one. He was financially out of control. He couldn’t handle it by himself; however, the last thing he did was pay off my ten-thousand-dollar Harvard student loan. When I saw that, I broke down. That action captured the essence of who he was. Personally, he was lost and didn’t know how to ask for help; yet he was thinking about helping me. Ahren came out to Detroit about three weeks into my stay. We were cleaning up in the basement.

  “This is it for us, isn’t it, Court?”

  “What?”

  “This is it. This is the end, isn’t it?”

  “What are you talking about? What are you saying? Where did that come from?” I started thinking about what lies I might have told. Who had she spoken to? What might she have found out?

  Ahren didn’t say anything else. But the writing was on the wall. She knew this was going to totally unmoor me; that I would never be the same; that we would never be the same. She knew I was going to run.

  In between all this I would practice my lines to myself. I had to keep the show in the back of my mind. I had to keep my rhythms going—every now and then say the words, just to keep the rhythms in my body.

  Right before Cec and I left Detroit to return to our respective lives, our mother made us make a promise to her and each other.

  “I want the whole family to go to therapy.”

  I didn’t know anything about therapy except that until this point I had resisted it. I didn’t know how to deal with this. I felt like my head was going to explode. I knew I desperately needed help. I thought, “I don’t know about you, but I gotta see somebody. I’m definitely losing my mind!”

  I packed some stuff up into a little U-Haul I rented and drove home alone. I listened to Oleta Adams’s “Get Here” and Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” which was like Ahren crying out to me.

  I wept all the way back to New York. Somehow, I had known that my dad needed me. I felt that somehow he had been calling out to someone his whole life. Somehow I knew that but could never find a way to bridge the gap while I was home. I was always escaping back to school, escaping back to my life in New York and leaving him to his demons. It was a very long drive back East.

  I was destroyed. And even though I was returning to my home, I didn’t know what I was heading into. Things wouldn’t be the same.

  Chapter 9

  Lightning in a Bottle

  Now that I was “Tina Turner,” I had thirty days to get in shape, learn the movements, work my behind off. I was a regular person—I wasn’t fit, I didn’t go to the gym. Since Tina is known for having this incredible body, and dancing is cardiovascular, I decided I’d better get a trainer. I’d get up at about 5:00 a.m. and go work out for two hours. He put me on a diet of chicken, broccoli or string beans and white potatoes—chicken for protein, green beans for carbohydrates, white potatoes for energy. And I drank a lot of black coffee for the caffeine, and water. Every now and then he’d make me some ol’ tofu cheese-cake or something for a little sweetness, though it wasn’t as sweet as we know it. I didn’t have time to go to a restaurant and order, so every week or so I’d cook in bulk. I’d get twenty potatoes, twenty-five chicken breasts and a bunch of green beans. Each day I’d put some in a container, maybe I could heat it up, then stand up and eat. Michael Peters would tell me to sit down and eat, but I couldn’t. I only had a certain amount of time and there was so much I needed to cram into my brain, into my body, into my feet. I felt like I was under the gun.

  After my morning workout we danced for about twelve hours a day. Michael had a spirit of excellence and an incredible work dynamic. We didn’t know it at the time, but he also had AIDS; he didn’t have a lot of energy. He would lie on the couch napping while his assistant, Eartha Robinson, and I would work in the studio. Eartha and I would watch Tina’s videotapes together and do the exact thing. I had to learn all the steps to all the songs, every nuance, every movement of Tina’s. She didn’t sit on a stool and she didn’t dance easy. It was all very, very physical. I had to learn complete routines so they could be filmed straight through from beginning to end, from top to bottom, nonstop. It wasn’t like how we shoot movies—in portions—or how you hear singers sing one line and get that right, then sing another, and the producers put it all together at the end. You had to have stamina. You had to know the routine. You had to make it believable in five-inch stilettos. So Eartha and I would work, then at the end of the evening we’d wait for Michael to get up, then we’d show him what we had accomplished. Eartha was the nurturer, Michael would crack the whip. “This isn’t right, that isn’t right, tweak this, tweak that. Put on those heels and do it.” He worked me. I went, I danced, I stood, I ate a little something, I danced some more. Somehow I got through it. Needless to say, my body was achin’! Absolutely everything hurt—ooh-aah-eee-aah hurt! The more I danced, the more my body shrank. Every week I’d go to a costume fitting and every week they’d take in another inch.

  While I was learning the dances, I also had to learn my lines and get the dialect right. I was trying to approximate her dramatic style of speaking, as well as that particular sound of hers—the “ah’s” she spoke, being from the South but living in Europe. I also had to develop the character. Who was this woman? And how could I portray her in a way that you’d believe it and be touched by the power of her accomplishments? I read everything I could about T
ina and Ike. I examined the personality of one and then the other. I tried to read between the lines of her biography, tried to put myself in each situation and figure out what my choices would be. I tried to imagine what their interpersonal dynamics were. When it came to experiencing abuse, I couldn’t draw much upon personal experience, but I did know what it was like to have allowed myself to be convinced by a man that his way is the right way. I did know what it was like to let a man convince me to stay longer than I really wanted to. I did know what it was like to do something and say afterward, “Why wasn’t I strong enough to say no?” Or, “Why didn’t I chance to hurt his feelings? Because I felt in my soul—I knew in my spirit, to my core—that it wasn’t good for me.”

  Many times we stand on the outside of another person’s life, looking in, judging them. We ask ourselves, Now, why would they allow that? Why would they let someone treat them badly? We think, It doesn’t make any sense. The abuse is consistent and it continues. Why can’t she say “enough is enough”? I think I have a particular capacity for mercy—for feeling, for relating to, for empathizing with others—especially those who are sad, going through it, put upon, subjugated or oppressed, whether by their own choosing or by someone else’s. I don’t think that experiencing such circumstances makes a person less worthy of love, compassion, care, sympathy or aid. I had heard talk of my mother going through it that time with Teddy Slaughter. That was just a week, just one occurrence. Still, I could imagine what it must be like when you have no money and someone else controls the purse strings. When you really feel that you’re at the mercy of another person for food, shelter and clothing, when you receive the basic human necessities through them. You must feel very vulnerable. You might believe you have to stay there. Or maybe you believe no one else would want you—you let the question “Who would want you?” sink in. I was certain that question could damage a woman if she bought into it, if she believed any part of it. If she didn’t believe, for instance, in the Bible verse “If God be for you, who can be against you?” That would play into her fear, which is a very powerful emotion.