by Tyra Banks
While most kids left Disney with huge smiles on their faces, I was always on the verge of tears when we’d walk away from that spectacular electrical parade at the end of the night. “I can’t be a princess, Daddy! I can’t be on top of the float,” I’d sob, “I have to be one of the dancing ladies on the ground.”
So when Disney announced that they were doing The Princess and the Frog, and Princess Tiana was black, I damn near leapt off my lily pad.
“Oh my God!” I screamed, to any- and everyone who would listen. “I can be this princess! She’s black. She’s from Louisiana—I can do accents! I can sound younger! I was made to be a cartoon character.”
Through all my yapping, I finally got an audition. And I killed it. Killed it enough to get a callback, which was where I really let loose. I did my lines to a T, and then when they wanted ad-libs, I was pulling out every Southern trick in my book. “You bess bring dem beignets ova here, boy,” and “Dat swamp be fulla gaytas. I ain’t goin’ in dere.” (LaShawn would have been proud.) Then when they wanted me to play the frog Tiana turns into, I was ribbiting all over the place like I’d just swallowed a teacup of tadpoles. I really went for it, and they were really impressed. “Wow, you’re really good, Tiana!” said one of the casting directors. “OMG! He called me the character’s name!” I shrieked in my head. I was flyin’ high.
I knew it was in the bag when they offered to take me on a tour of the animation studio, and I was happier than I’d been since waiting an hour and a half for Space Mountain.
There were different renderings of Tiana and the frog all throughout the animation studio, some done on computers, some done by hand, some with short legs, some with long. There was the town where the story took place and even a drawing of Tiana’s mom right next to a photo of Oprah! I felt like I was getting a real peek behind the scenes. “Oh my God,” I thought. “They’re doing this because they want me to see what my character is going to look like. I bet they’re analyzing me so that the frog has some of my features? You know they like the animated animals to sometimes kinda look like the real people playing them. . . .”
Everyone is coming up to me to introduce themselves, and we’re all laughing, getting to know each other, and talking about how great my accent was and how strong I ribbited in the audition. I was having so much fun that I wasn’t paying attention to where we were going. Until we ended up at a piano.
I saw it, and all I thought was “Oh cool, they’ve got a piano. This place has everything.” Yeah, it still wasn’t hitting me. I was still on my Disney cloud.
Then someone introduced me to the pianist. “Tyra, pick a song, any Disney song,” he said.
“Um, what?”
Smiling faces surrounded me. “We just want to hear you sing,” someone said. “So go ahead, whenever you’re ready.”
“Why do I have to sing?” I thought. “Did Cameron Diaz sing in Shrek? Can’t someone else do the songs?”
Finally, I was able to buy myself some time. They still wanted me to sing, but they were going to let me prepare something for them and sing it later. I rushed out of there determined not to let my Disney princess dreams die.
Carolyn: Tyra was so, so happy when she was in the megahit Disney TV movie Life-Size. Girls around the world are obsessed with the doll-come-to-life character she played, Eve. But she really, really wanted to get the part of the Frog Princess. This was the time Tyra’s overly enunciating, Broadway-style singing would have been spot-on, and she could sound so sweet and youthful. Her voice has always sounded much younger than she is. Besides, it would have made up for all those times I had to drag a crying little girl back to Dumbo F95 at the end of the Electrical Parade.
Tyra: Back at my house, I was trying. I was singing “Someday My Prince Will Come” and “I’m Wishing,” and I was trying to get all those “ah-aha-aha” trills . . . and I was failing. Big-time. I call up my friend, superproducer and recording artist Kenneth Edmonds, a.k.a. Babyface, and almost cried to him about it. “They want me to sing and I want to impress them—what do I do?”
He told me to calm down and come to his studio. When I got there, he’d written a whole damn song for me to sing, about a girl and a frog in New Orleans. It had this sweet, swamplike, laid-back vibe to it, but it was still quintessentially Disney princess. It was bananas. To be clear, bananas to me means amazing! He kept humming and singing it to me, and trying to get me to sing it back with a full and strong voice. I just couldn’t get it right, no matter how much I practiced.
“OK, so I’m totally incapable of singing your genius of a song,” I said. “But you wrote an original Disney song for me in the span of a few hours and that’s beyond dope; you should send it to them!” I don’t think he ever submitted the song, but he should have. Did I say it was bananas?
I kept trying and trying different songs, and working with my vocal coach, until I was finally able to lay down that famed Pocahontas song, “Colors of the Wind” (the movie version, not the silky, soulful Vanessa Williams one—which I still loved, too), and I sent it to Disney. My fingers were crossed and I was holding my breath and turning blue. Then I got the phone call of phone calls. It was down to me and two other voices—both of whom were singers. One was a very famous singer from American Idol and a Dreamgirl. The other was also a Dreamgirl. Two Dreamgirls. Real singers. Dammit. But still, I was hopeful—those girls could sing, but what if they couldn’t ribbit? And certainly, they couldn’t want it as badly as I did, right? I practically came out of the womb wearing mouse ears—I was born to play this role.
I was so excited, I didn’t sleep while I waited for the call. Every time the phone started ringing, I’d race across the room, vault the couch, and swing from the chandelier to answer it on the second ring. “Hello, Disney?” I’d breathlessly say into the receiver.
“No, um, it’s the dry cleaner?” the voice on the other end would say. “Your shirts are ready.”
“Ribbit.”
“What?”
“Never mind. Thank you.”
Finally, I got the call.
I held my breath while they told me the news I had never hoped for: Princess Tiana would be played by Anika Noni Rose. A real Dreamgirl.
My dream was over. Done. Was not gonna happen. I was devastated. Did this mean I had put all those lily pads in the pool for nothing? “Can’t they just get Anika to do the songs and I’ll be the acting voice?” I asked. I was OK with sharing! I had my agent call and call and call until finally she said, “Tyra, it’s done. They’re moving on, and you should, too.”
Not long after I realized I wasn’t going to be the princess, or even the frog, I was having lunch with my music manager, Benny Medina. Benny was the third music manager I’d had. Three managers, still no album. But I was hopeful. Benny had worked with J.Lo, so if he could help her become a pop star, maybe he could do it for me. “Tyra, I just want to check in and make sure I’m doing my job to your satisfaction,” he said as I scarfed down my Caesar salad. “I want you to be happy and on the right path. So humor me: Imagine that you’re walking into this restaurant a year from now. What do you want all these important people to think when they see Tyra Banks come through that door?”
We were at the Ivy, one of the most industry- and celebrity-heavy restaurants in L.A. As I looked around, I could see people who were super influential in fashion, film, TV, music, and business. Yeah, I knew that they were the “important” people, but I realized they weren’t the main people I wanted to impress. In fact, in that moment, it hit me. I wanted to do more than just impress people. I wanted to connect with people. Deeply.
“I want people to feel power when I walk in,” I told Benny. “But not the power that most people understand. Power doesn’t just come from money and success; I think true power comes from being someone who speaks up about things that matter and works to make crappy things they see in the world better. I want to be a force for positive change. I wa
nt to make people feel better about themselves and show them that they’re not alone.”
Benny smiled and took a sip of his iced tea.
“Then why the hell aren’t you doing a talk show?” he said.
In that moment, something in my brain clicked in a way it hadn’t since I’d first had the idea for Top Model, standing in my kitchen in my underwear. “You can model, do Top Model, your music, and do a talk show . . .” he continued.
I nodded, but inside, I had already made up my mind.
Mama always said that in addition to having tunnel vision and focus, you need to have time to sit and do nothing so you can hear what your next moves should be to reach the pinnacle of success. Well, it was time I started listening.
A couple of days later, Benny received a phone call from me.
“Hi, Benny. I want to stop singing.”
“What?”
“Yep. I’m going to put all of my energy into creating a kick-ass, game-changing talk show.”
ALL APOLOGIES
Real women know when to say sorry. So, here I go: Kobe: I messed up your solo rap debut. Pharrell/Wyclef: I wasted your time. Benny: You spent countless hours working with me on my singing strategy when you could have been spending more time with J.Lo. David Foster: Sorry for keeping you tied up in your Malibu studio when you could have been hanging with your beautiful future supermodel family and watching the sunset. Babyface: You wrote that song for me when you coulda been working on another hit for Whitney Houston! Disney: Well, ummmm . . . it’s never too late. Ha!
Carolyn: I think your gut instinct is usually the right one. With Tyra, I think she always knew she wasn’t supposed to be a singer, but she’s not a quitter, so it took her a while to let that mic drop without picking it up again. When she finally did hit the brakes on her singing career, and called to tell me she was done, I did a secret happy dance. I could finally take a full breath again after all those months of biting my tongue and gritting my teeth every time someone asked her for the money note.
Tyra wasn’t meant to be the next Katy Perry or J.Lo. But the girl could talk and had a gift for helping people see the inner and outer beauty they couldn’t see in themselves.
Tyra: I do think I was talented when it came to music. My talents just didn’t lie on the mic. I was more of a behind-the-scenes girl: I wrote the theme song to the short-lived FABLife talk show and coproduced all the Top Model remixes. In my time, I think I wrote some damned good songs, if I do say so myself.
I teamed up with Big Bert (a producer who was dating Brandy at the time) to write a song called “Beautiful Girl.” He had made this gorgeous melody, and we sat up in the studio until the wee hours of the morning, eating crab and garlic noodles from one of my fave spots, Crustacean, while he played it on a loop and I wrote the lyrics. It was all about how women should cherish the beauty of their soul and resist the pressure to be perfect (a theme that should sound familiar to you by the end of this book). I still think the world needs to hear this! Just not with me singing. With someone like Rihanna. Or maybe like . . . I don’t know . . . Rihanna? So, what you think, world (Rihanna)? Should we put it out there? (Hey, Rihanna, DM me, girl. You won’t be disappointed.)
But when I started preproduction of my talk show, I went all in. I put those singing dreams so far up on the shelf that I woulda needed a hundred-foot stepladder to get them down again. I was told that 90 percent of talk shows failed before the first season even wrapped. If I wanted my show to succeed, I needed to live it and breathe it. So I moved out of my huge Beverly Hills house into a tiny apartment across the street from the talk show studio.
Shortly after that, my idol and hero, Oprah, threw her famous three-days-long Legends Ball at her sprawling home in Montecito, California. She invited and celebrated women like Coretta Scott King, Maya Angelou, and Naomi Sims as the legends, and also included what she referred to as “young’uns,” legends of the future. When I opened the most beautifully crafted and illustrious invitation I have ever received in the mail and saw that Ms. Winfrey considered me a young’un, I was speechless. To be recognized by Oprah and to be surrounded by such incredible women was one of the most awe-inspiring experiences of my life. At the dreamlike luncheon on the first day, Oprah had this new singer she’d discovered perform, and he was just wonderful. “John Legend?” I remember thinking. “His voice is amazing! I’ll have to remember that name in case he gets big.”
Day two was a white-tie ball with a black-and-white dress code (you had to wear black or white—Oprah laid down that law), and there’s Toni Morrison over here and Rosa Parks over there, and I’m intimidated just to be standing in the same room with all these, well, living legends. Oprah was the only person who wore red, and she looked like a rare, beautiful ruby fluttering throughout the party, never resting, constantly producing to make sure everything was running on point. “Oh my God, you look like a princess,” she said when I entered the ballroom as she hugged me. “You know what? Better yet, a queen.” If I couldn’t be a Disney princess, being an Oprah queen was the next best thing. No, it was better.
At the ball, this young senator gave an incredible speech, without even reading anything off a teleprompter, and there was hardly a dry eye in the place because he was speaking so raw, so real, and from the heart. I can be a little shy in places like this, and after dinner, my wacky friend dragged me out of my chair to dance and work the room. Eventually, we made our way over to the senator, and my buddy was being her fun, wild self and talking to him like she’d known him her entire life—she may have dropped a few expletives here and there. She had me blushing through my bronzer—oh my God, girl, this man is important!—and when she walked away, I apologized to him in case she’d offended him.
“What, you think I’ve never heard those words before?” he said with a laugh. He was the nicest, realest politician I’d ever met.
“Huh,” I thought as I walked away from our conversation. “Barack Obama. I better remember that name, too.”
The closing event of the weekend was a Sunday brunch, and for this, we were allowed to bring a date. I, of course, brought my date for life: my mama. Across all her sprawling acres, Oprah had set up picnic tables full of barbecue and other tasty tidbits, but the highlight came before the food: a gospel revival concert helmed by BeBe Winans (who I am low-key obsessed with. His voice is one of my all-time faves!). At some point, they started singing a classic gospel song called “Changed,” and it was clear that everybody knew the words.
BeBe started passing the mic.
He passed it to Shirley Caesar, who tore it up. “He changed me!” she sang at the top of her lungs. Then Dionne Warwick was on deck. Whew, yes, child! Then Yolanda Adams. Sang, girl, sang! As Usher looked on, the mic then went to Chaka Khan—Let me rock you, let me rock you, Chaka Khan! Gladys Knight then took control and put some Pip in all our steps. Valerie Simpson did her thing while her husband cheered her on, and Patti LaBelle took us home, baby! Mama was sitting next to me, crying and clapping along and having the time of her life.
That is when something dawned on me. Something horrible.
“Mama, oh my God,” I said as soon as the song was over. “If I had a hit song on the radio right now, they would have passed that mic to me!”
Carolyn: If they would have passed the mic to Tyra, I would have done what any good mother would do: created a distraction and told her ass to run.
Tyra: That moment there with my mom, in the presence of my idol Oprah and so many other greats, was the moment when everything was so clear to me. I realized just how strong one could be if they focused on their strengths. Yes, we all have dreams and fantasies and desires, and those are all worth exploring—but I now see that we shouldn’t blindly force it. Listen to your gut, because it usually knows what’s up.
The downside of being really driven is that sometimes you keep your foot on the gas even when you’re going in the wrong direction, but I don�
�t regret all that time (six years) and money (thousands upon thousands) I spent trying to make a singing career happen. That time helped me identify my weaknesses. Knowing my weaknesses helped me identify my strengths. I had to learn to tell the difference between a dream and a calling, and focus my life on following the calling, not chasing the dream. Just because I couldn’t sing didn’t mean I couldn’t use my voice for good.
Carolyn: “Mm-hmm, baby,” I told Tyra after that “Changed” song with the powerful voices wrapped up. “I’m so happy you changed your mind. You are now focused on your gift, which is giving people opportunities they never thought they could ever have had. And I think for that, for your talking voice and power, one day when you’re old and gray—and you will not dye your hair—for all that you did, you, too, will be called a legend.”
HAPPILY EVER AFTER
Tyra: When The Princess and the Frog came out, I had a couple of the cutest little girls on my (two-time best show Emmy-winning—yep, it was my calling) talk show. The gist was that they couldn’t afford to go to the movie, so we surprised them by taking their families on a plane to Disney World to see the movie and to meet Princess Tiana. At the amusement park, the girls were so excited and screaming and crying, and hugging Tiana like her princess powers would rub off on them if they got close enough.
I have to admit, for a second I looked at that princess and thought, “That coulda been me.” But then I snapped right back to reality. I was actually glad it wasn’t, because Tiana for me was never meant to be.
But Disney, if you ever need a princess who raps . . . well, holla at ya girl. I even got a ninth-grade rhyme I know by heart.
