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The Mother of Black Hollywood

Page 20

by Jenifer Lewis


  It was a huge turning point in my life. Though I had been in therapy for a long while, I don’t think I had been honestly serious about the whole thing. Well, now I was. That was the worst night of my life. It was also my proudest moment. I had to settle back into therapy with my newfound promise of being disciplined with my medication.

  If the breakdown during The Temptations had not been enough, the call came that my Grandma Small had died. I flew to St. Louis to help comfort her fifteen children. Six sons: Robert, Walter, Roy, Charles, John, and Michael; nine daughters: Dorothy, Catherine, Rosetta, Jean, Shirley, Gloria, Janice, Margaret, and Mary. My aunt Louise had already passed away. There were two sisters as well: Ida Clay and Membry Brown, and 79 grandchildren, 105 great-grandchildren, and 17 great-great-grandchildren.

  I had written a song about Grandma Small for The Diva Is Dismissed. It was everybody’s favorite:

  Staring through the backscreen door

  I finished my spaghetti plate

  I sho’ be glad when I’m all grown up

  My Aint Rosetta is always late

  (My Aint Rosetta is always late)

  My mama is the oldest of sixteen kids

  And I’m the baby of seven

  Cat Johnny drove a Big Gray Cadillac

  And everybody thought that he was in heaven

  (Everybody thought that he was in heaven)

  But my Grandma Small, she took care of me

  My Grandma Small made cabbage for me

  My Grandma Small took me in

  Even when I didn’t win

  Somebody said the old house was haunted

  So, I’d go there to play

  I’d grab Billy Ray by his checkered shirt

  (It was a crystal blue sky day)

  It was a crystal blue sky day

  What you want for your birthday, girl?

  Just a brand-new bike

  I was twelve years old, my daddy brought it in

  Hey, Daddy, can’t you stay for just one night?

  (Can’t you sleep over for just one night?)

  But my Grandma Small, she watched over me

  My Grandma Small was always happy to see me

  My Grandma Small took me in

  Even when I didn’t win

  One day after school

  I was watching her work in her garden

  She slipped and fell

  So, I ran to help

  She said, “No, child, I don’t need to get up

  If I can’t get up by myself”

  (By myself)

  My Grandma Small, she took care of me

  My Grandma Small, she was always happy to see me

  My Grandma Small, took me in

  Even when I didn’t win

  She took me in

  Even when I didn’t win

  The next morning, I went to downtown St. Louis hoping I could sit on the banks of the Mississippi and do some healing. I walked over the grassy knoll and took in every majestic angle of the St. Louis arch, gateway to the West. I walked down to the muddy river, sat on the cobblestones—which had been laid there by enslaved Africans—and proceeded to have my own pity party. I knew I had to get it out. I cried like a baby. I remembered what my grandmother had said: “I don’t need to get up if I can’t get up by myself.” So, I stood up and walked. I walked and I walked.

  With the St. Louis skyline behind me, I realized the past was just that, the past. I needed to get back to Los Angeles. Refill my prescriptions, get serious about pilates and meditate everyday, and take care of my health—mentally, physically, and spiritually.

  My answering machine was full when I got home. There was Whoopi, inviting me to her birthday party, and Bette Midler asking me to do The Roseanne Barr Show with her. I learned I had been cast in Mystery Men as William H. Macy’s wife, and Oprah’s people called to invite me to the Beloved premiere. Life was good.

  I thought the sky was the limit when I was asked to audition for Cast Away starring Tom Hanks. Tom fucking Hanks! Thank you, Mississippi River. I studied my ass off. I was getting this job. I was going to cross over into the A-list world. This was my big chance. I landed the audition like a 747 in these motherfucking streets. I was so pleased with myself that after I did the scene I tossed the script aside, slapped my hands down on the table and said, “Now, that was brilliant.” The director, Robert Zemeckis, and the casting director, laughed at my sassy confidence. They called me right back and said I had the job.

  It was thrilling to start shooting Cast Away. I had studied hard, was fully confident in my lines, and felt prepared to give Tom Hanks a run for his money. Before shooting my first scene with Tom, I was getting my hair done and decided to take a moment to look over the script for Jackie’s Back!, the movie for Lifetime that I would start shooting the following week. I was looking at the scene where a mink hat my character wore was taken and burned. My line was “Give me back my head, bitch.” I heard the trailer door open, but didn’t look up. I happened to be practicing a scene where a mink hat I wore was taken and burned. My line was “Give me back my head, bitch.”

  A male voice said, “Give me back my head, bitch.” It was Tom, peering over my shoulder and reading the first line on the page. It was surprising to see him because big stars almost never come to hair and makeup with the rest of us. He had his own Gulf Stream trailer to dress in. “Is that in our scene? Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, “I thought you were reading a scene from Cast Away.” He sounded hurt. “You were getting ready to do a scene with me and you’re practicing for another project?” I was so embarrassed.

  We got in rehearsal and I was nervous and over the top. He called me over and said, “Don’t say it if you don’t mean it.” In the next take, I got myself together and proceeded to do the hell out of the scene. I played the role of Tom’s boss at the FedEx facility where his character worked. In the scene, we’d gotten a call from Moscow that packages were not moving through to get to their destinations as they should.

  We actors stood next to a conveyer belt. I heard “Action!” and said to Tom, “You go to Moscow.” As I did, boxes came up the conveyor belt. Tom, who was poised to get my goat, picked up a box, tossed it in my direction, and said, “Here’s your head, bitch!” Oh, we cut up on that set as if we had been raised on the same block. To this day, every time I see Tom, be it on the red carpet or at a restaurant, he teases me with, “Did you find your head yet, bitch?”

  Filming Cast Away was mind-blowing. I learned so much working with Tom. And I realized that living in my show-business bubble, it had never occurred to me to think about how packages got from one place to the other. The operations of FedEx in real life are like a city, with ten zillion boxes, people, machines, and trucks. Who’d a thunk? I was blown away by that and by the fact that nearly all my scenes in Cast Away ended up on the cutting room floor.

  THIRTEEN

  JACKIE’S BACK!

  I began taking writing classes for professional and personal reasons. I felt it was time for growth. I joined forces with my dear friends Mark Alton Brown and Dee La Duke to write a movie for me to star in. I shouldn’t even say we wrote it. Jackie’s Back! wrote itself. It was basically a compilation of the fevered, insane conversations we’d had for years. We came away with a mockumentary about Jackie Washington, a 1960s/70s-style R&B diva on the comeback.

  The concept arose from Mark and I having watched a documentary about the singer Shirley Bassey called Have Voice, Will Travel. I love and adore Shirley Bassey. I pray every night to be able to hit the notes that bitch hits and I train my lungs constantly to hold notes longer than she does. Both are impossible.

  In the documentary Shirley proclaimed multiple times that she was the greatest entertainer in the world. We wove that attitude, along with some aspects of my personality, into the Jackie Washington character. What distinguished Jackie from me most was that she would never doubt herself. She believed her own bullshit: that she was fabulous always and forever. I, on the other hand, might proclaim “I’m fab
ulous, I’m fabulous,” but then pull back and cry myself to sleep wracked with self-doubt.

  Barry Krost, my manager at the time, tried to sell the script all over town. Lifetime picked it up and the one and only Robert Townsend was chosen to direct. All y’all need to know is that during the first meeting with the Lifetime executives, one of them raised her hand timidly and, referring to the script, asked, “What does ‘Cuth what? Thank you, no mo’ mean?” In his thick English accent, Barry replied, “Oh, darling, I honestly don’t know what it means, but when Jackie Washington says it, it’s quite clear.”

  I found that producing a movie is a whole nother thing, very different from creating a stage production for one actor. In producing, the bottom line is money. I was fortunate that my friends put me, not compensation, first. We rallied a long list of greats to make cameo appearances: The first person I called was Whoopi. Now, something you guys don’t know—because I had become the entertainer’s entertainer, all the divas who love me sort of competed in claiming responsibility for my becoming a star. So, I was no fool. I played them against each other—with love, of course. I told Whoopi I had Bette. I told Bette I had Whoopi. I told Rosie I had Whoopi and Bette. I told Loretta I had Whoopi, Bette, and Rosie. Barry Krost got Dolly Parton and JoBeth Williams. Robert Townsend got Don Cornelius. I snatched Chris Rock just walking across the lawn at the Beverly Hills Hotel. If you look closely and listen, he has no idea what he’s talking about. What he’s saying doesn’t even make sense, but who cares? It was Chris Rock and he did it for Jenifer Lewis.

  When they told me Tim Curry would be my co-star, all I could think of was him in that bustier and garter belt in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I proceeded to levitate off the ground. The shit was set in motion. Robert Townsend took a crew to the set of Girl, Interrupted and got Whoopi in costume as a nurse. I had been up for that part. Bitch. They went to New York and got Liza Minnelli. Unfuckingbelievable. Then, when the head of Lifetime, Laurette Hayden, called and told me her mother had agreed to do a cameo, I proceeded to jump as high as the Maasai in Ngorongoro. Her mother was, of course, the legendary actress Eva Marie Saint, Miss North by Northwest herself.

  Then Jackie Collins agreed to say that Jackie Washington had died from choking on a chitlin. We got Kathy Najimy, Kathy Griffin, and Sean Hayes. When Diahann Carroll proclaimed she had built herself from the ground up and was calling her lawyer to sue Jackie for, whatever mind I had was lost. When Penny Marshall nasaled her way through her monologue, the gods came down from the heavens and blessed the entire production.

  One theme of the movie is a corny double entendre. We named Jackie Washington’s youngest daughter Antandre, and then had Jackie ask her for a drink and make the obvious request: Ready, “Make it a double, Antandre!”

  The environment on the set equaled one word—laughter. My favorite scene is when Jackie comes out of the house, drunk, and tells the detective, “Wait a minute,” so she can fix her hair for the cameras after stabbing Milkman, her husband, with an Afro pick. By the way, Milkman was played by the wonderful Richard Lawson, who later married Tina Knowles, Beyoncé’s mama. I actually went on one date with him. Shit, had I known Tina would be my competition, I’d-a worn a lower neckline! But seriously, Richard and I were no Jackie and Milkman. We became more like sister and brother, which is very cool.

  In the movie when you see that Playboy spread with Jackie’s legs in a wide split, I just want y’all to know that’s my real body. I am a yoga and Pilates diva after all. And let’s not forget captain of the fucking cheerleading squad in high school.

  On the day we shot the “Coco” scene, Rudy Ray Moore, portraying the main gangster, could not get the line right. He was supposed to say, “I will see you in the sequel, Coco!” But in take after take he kept calling her “Shakoan.” Over and over again, “Shakoan, Shakoan, Shakoan.” So in a looping session, I begged Robert Townsend to let me say, “Shakoan,” for no good reason before Coco kicks ass in that scene. To this day, Mark Brown and I end every phone conversation not with “goodbye,” but with “I will see you in the sequel, Shakoan!”

  The day before shooting the scene with David Hyde Pierce, who played my deaf pianist, we had filmed a full-out production of “Love Goddess” accompanied by my high kicks over and over again. The next day, at the piano when I had to kick over my head, it was impossible. That pain you see when I try to raise my leg was probably the most real moment in the film. Luckily, the genius of David Hyde Pierce masks it.

  Isabel Sanford portrayed Jackie’s play mama, Miss Krumes, who famously says, “White people smell like wet potato chips.” Between takes, Isabel told me stories about Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy on the set of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Apparently, Katharine was appalled that Isabel took the public bus to the set every day. She insisted Isabel be given a chauffeured car.

  Marc Shaiman was an unbelievable friend to score the movie for close to nothing. He was in the midst of scoring Ghosts of Mississippi, so we worked on Jackie’s Back! during his lunch breaks. His favorite lyric in the entire movie is in “Love Goddess”: “. . . just like Aphrodite in her nightie. You’re like Thor, I’m like Venus, something’s got to come between us. Love Goddess!”

  Jackie’s Back! was in the can and left with the editor. We crossed our fingers and something deep inside told me it was going to be good. When Jackie’s Back! was finally ready, Barry Krost wouldn’t let me see it until he threw an intimate party to celebrate. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to make sure it was good before anyone else saw it. I walked into the party wearing a hoodie under my coat and repressing the rage of a petulant five-year-old not getting her way. Inside I was yearning, hoping, and praying to God to please let it be good. I refused all hors d’oeuvres and drinks. I clutched up in a chair in fetal position, not making eye contact, and was silent. Silent? Y’all know I was scared.

  During shooting, I had seen most, but not all, of the dailies. When the movie came on I stayed clutched up until Liza Minnelli, whose dailies I had not seen, came on the screen. When she said “I don’t know much about the African . . . ” the hoodie dropped, the coat flew off, and I came out of my body screaming in joy, “Somebody, break out the champagne” Jackie’s Back! was in fact the best shit I had ever seen. Humbly.

  At the premiere, I spotted Rachel in the crowd. I could tell how proud she was of me; like a peacock strutting his beautiful plumage. Everybody was happy. Everybody was proud. A lot of people flew in, including Dr. Roma Little Walker, a friend I’d met on my trip to Egypt, Mrs. Butler, my high school counselor, and Ethel Rue, my “Fat Jackie” partner from Kinloch. My cousin Ronnie did cartwheels. We had a late-night celebration at Kate Mantilini restaurant in Beverly Hills.

  A few days later, I left for New York, but I didn’t really need the plane. I was flying high, heading to the city to promote Jackie’s Back! on the Rosie O’Donnell Show. I had been dating a man named Terrence for about a year at this time, and brought him with me. When we landed back at LAX, Lifetime had sent a limousine for us. On the ride home, Terrence, who played a TV reporter in the film, spotted a huge billboard for Jackie’s Back! with my face ten feet tall. We screamed and shouted while our heads stuck out of the limo’s sun roof. The billboards were all over the city. The premiere of the film, June 22, 1999, was one of the happiest days of my life. Flowers and gifts streamed in from Whoopi, Penny Marshall, Toni Braxton, The Boat, my sisters and brothers. Whitney and Bobby sent the largest roses I had ever seen. They were from Africa. Wow!

  Unfortunately, the ratings for Jackie’s Back! were low. I guess their Lifetime core audience was just not ready for my shenanigans. Fuck them if they can’t take a joke. But the critics received it as they had received mostly everything I had done. Raves, raves, raves, raves. Life went on.

  Over the years, Jackie’s Back! has developed a cult following. All kinds of people—black folks, gypsies, soccer moms, the gay community—stop me on planes, in movie theaters, or at the mall when I’m bra shopping, and tell
me they watch the movie over and over again. It even has its own holiday, Jackie Washington Day, which is celebrated on July 15. I’ve been to events where people dress up like characters in the movie and recite the dialogue right along with the actors. Just like the fans of Rocky Horror.

  After the wonderful experience of Jackie’s Back!, I got incredible news from Mark and Bobby. They had decided to become parents by adopting a child. They asked me to write a letter of reference to the judge for them. I was honored to do that. It was like an affirmation of our committed friendship. I was present with them when the adoption was confirmed.

  I was the first to hold Ella Cesaria Brown after Mark and Bobby. They named her after Ella Fitzgerald. She was exceptionally beautiful. I remember saying to my own beautiful daughter, Charmaine, “She’s got face,” meaning she’s has beauty and personality. Mark and Bobby adopted their wonderful son, Sander, a few years later. It has been a monumental pleasure for this here godmama to love and spoil them rotten.

  FOURTEEN

  MOTHER COURAGE

  On screen I have portrayed Whitney’s mama, Tupac’s mama, Taraji’s mama, Terrence J’s mama, Gabrielle’s mama, and Raven-Symoné’s grandmother. I even played Angela Bassett’s mama in What’s Love Got to Do With It despite being just eighteen months older than her! Sometimes I think, “They’re gonna ask me to play Miss Jane Pittman’s mama next!”

 

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