Becoming Beyoncé

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  The “Pretty Hurts” video was Beyoncé Knowles at age thirty-two, a woman finally grappling with deep-seated confusion and obviously even a certain amount of rage about her hardworking childhood. But as a little girl, she was just on autopilot. On some level, maybe she was angry back then, even if she didn’t yet recognize it, or even understand it. Or maybe she somehow knew how to suppress it. It would seem, though, that at least based on what she would later say as an adult, the anger was there just the same.

  “People Don’t Need to Know”

  At a very young age, Beyoncé Knowles began to understand that one way to keep her privacy was to compartmentalize her life. Of course, today she’s an expert at it. Certainly the way she controls what she allows to be known about her is an important part of her business model. In fact, most of her public doesn’t know very much about her personal life at all, except what she has decided to spoon-feed them. “She makes it clear that there’s a difference between business and personal, and she keeps those two things sacred,” is how Kwasi Fordjour, the creative coordinator at Beyoncé’s Parkwood Entertainment company, succinctly put it in 2014. In the end, it’s a clever way of guaranteeing that her public focuses on her artistry and is not unduly distracted by any details of her personal life. “They see the talent, and that’s all they see,” Fordjour concluded.

  When she was a child, the children who ridiculed Beyoncé at school knew virtually nothing about her many pageant wins. “I didn’t dare tell anyone because the last thing I wanted was more attention,” she recalled. “Plus, I knew they’d make fun of me: ‘Who does she think she is, a beauty queen?’ That would have been my absolute nightmare.”

  “I didn’t know a thing about her having done anything like that until many years later when she became famous,” said Chester Maddox, who attended school with Beyoncé. “I’m not sure I would have believed it anyway,” he added. “Not our little Beyoncé. I remember her as having no self-confidence whatsoever. So, no, I wouldn’t have believed she was fearless enough to be entering and then winning beauty or talent contests. No way.”

  Beyoncé also didn’t tell the girls at the pageants and shows anything about her life outside of that particular venue. “I distinctly remember trying to engage her about her school,” Denise Watkins, who competed with Beyoncé in many talent shows, recalled. “We were little kids yet she didn’t want me to know where she went to school. I thought, ‘Well, that’s a bit odd.’ My mother said, ‘What’s with that little girl and all her secrets?’ When I later found out she was a singer, I wasn’t surprised. My feeling was that I knew only a small part of her life and that the rest of it was known by others. I also felt that they didn’t know the small part I knew. To keep all of this straight at eight years of age, I don’t know how she managed it.”

  Taking it a step further, her classmates in school didn’t know anything about her home life. “It was like I had two different lives,” she would observe to Australian television personality Liam Bartlett in 2007. “I’ve been that way all of my life.”

  “What I most remember of Beyoncé as a kid wasn’t the bullying, it was the mystery of her,” recalled Jerome Whitley, who attended the fourth grade with her. “I would ask about her mother or her father, and she would get very quiet. Other kids always talked about their parents. Not Beyoncé.

  “I remember when her mother would come and pick her up from school. Whereas the other kids’ parents would show up in their beat-up old cars, Beyoncé’s mom would make a big splash. Here would come this Hollywood-looking woman with big sunglasses in a shiny new convertible, her long hair blowing in the breeze. ‘Come on, now, Beyoncé,’ she would say. ‘We got things to do.’ I actually thought Beyoncé’s mom was some kind of celebrity, and that this was why Beyoncé didn’t want to speak about her. I was sure of it, in fact. I remember going home at night and flipping through all the channels on the television looking for this stunning woman I later learned was Tina Knowles.”

  A Real Find

  Oh my God, Deborah,” exclaimed Denise Seals. “Did you hear the way that little girl sang? I can’t believe a child can sing like that!”

  Denise Seals and her close friend Deborah Laday were driving in Denise’s car after having just left the Evelyn Rubenstein Jewish Community Center, where an eight-year-old girl had knocked their socks off. As they drove down South Braeswood Boulevard through Houston, they couldn’t contain their enthusiasm. In fact, Deborah said she was so excited she was “fixin’ to cry. That girl is a real find, Denise!” she exclaimed.

  Denise nodded enthusiastically. “Finally, we found somebody who can really sing,” she said. “How many girls have we seen? A hundred?”

  “Two hundred,” Deborah exclaimed.

  “But it was worth it just to find this one,” Denise added. “What was her name again?”

  Deborah thought it over. “Was it Bernice?” she asked, unsure. No, she didn’t think that was it. “Belinda?” “Bernadette?” “Benita?” They simply could not remember. Deborah said she would call the dance studio in the morning and ask. “It’s a name I’ve never heard before,” she said, “with such an incredible voice. Imagine what we could do with that kind of talent!”

  For the last three months, Denise and Deborah had been searching for pretty young girls with singing or dancing ability. It was actually Denise who first had the idea of forming a musical revue that would feature at its center a girls’ group. “At the time, the group En Vogue was big, and I wanted to do something like that but with much younger girls,” she recalled. “My prior experience was that I had a background in music and had sung backup for several artists in the Houston area. I met Deborah through a mutual friend, and she too had the same desire. So we partnered up.”

  Deborah Laday, a professional bookkeeper, had also competed in beauty pageants along the way, so she understood the business. The two women were ideal counterparts, both big dreamers who were quite serious about their joint venture from the start, so much so that the first thing they did was form D&D Management, using the first initials of their names. They then rented office space from which to conduct business. Though it was all pie-in-the-sky stuff, they were determined to give it their all.

  “I had seen MC Hammer in concert and he had a revue, a group of singers, dancers, and rappers—and that’s sort of what we wanted to do,” Deborah Laday recalled. “First, we wanted to form the girls’ group part of the act, which would really be the foundation of the revue. To that end, we took out advertisements in the [Houston] Chronicle, saying we were looking for talent. Denise also knew quite a few choir directors in local churches, so she also put the word out to them.”

  The two women were in search of young girls between the ages of eight and twelve who not only could sing and dance but also had charisma and personality. Once word about their endeavor got out in the area, the floodgates opened. “We saw maybe a hundred girls right off the bat,” Denise recalled, “every parent in the Houston area who thought his or her kid could sing.”

  One day, a local dance instructor telephoned Deborah Laday to tell her that she’d been working with an eight-year-old named Beyoncé Knowles. She said she’d heard about the talent search and that this girl was so talented, she needed to be seen and heard to be believed. She told Deborah that Beyoncé would be singing at the Evelyn Rubenstein Jewish Community Center. “If you go, you will not be sorry,” she said. Of course, Deborah and Denise felt they had no choice but to attend.

  During the talent show, as soon as Beyoncé opened her mouth to sing her signature song, “Home,” the two women looked at one another with surprise. She sounded like a youngster who’d already had a great deal of professional experience. Her tone was clear, as was her enunciation. She also had a certain undeniable presence. She was confident, not at all shy. The way she connected with the audience, especially her eye contact with those seated in the front row, was fascinating.

  After Beyoncé finished her performance, Deborah and Denise went in search of he
r parents. They found Mathew and Tina completely surrounded by smiling, enthusiastic people, all of whom seemed to be singing Beyoncé’s praises. A beaming Tina held the hand of three-year-old Solange as she graciously accepted these compliments from strangers. Towering at her side was Mathew, seeming proud. Deborah and Denise made their way through the crowd. “Your daughter!” Deborah exclaimed once she was standing before the Knowleses. “Oh my God! She’s so good.” She told the Knowleses that she and Denise were attempting to form a girls’ group, and that they would love for Beyoncé to be their first acquisition. When Mathew wondered what sort of group the ladies were thinking of, they said they envisioned something along the lines of En Vogue or the Supremes, but much younger. As for what they planned to name the act, Deborah explained, “We were thinking that maybe it’s the girls’ time to shine in this business. So,” she said, “we’re thinking . . . Girls Tyme—that would be T-y-m-e.”

  As if on cue, little Beyoncé ran up to her parents. She was wearing a white blouse with a light blue dress that featured a crisscross pattern, her hair adorned with blue-and-white silk ribbons. “These ladies say they’re starting a girls’ group,” Mathew told his daughter as she looked up at him with adoring eyes. “They want you to be in it! So, what do you think of that?” The little girl smiled broadly. “Pleased to meet you,” she said, extending her hand to Deborah and then to Denise with no prompting at all from her folks. “I’d love to be in a group. Would that be okay, Mommy?” she asked. “We can talk about it, Beyoncé,” Tina said, nodding. Studying Beyoncé’s face, Deborah suddenly realized that she was already familiar with her; Beyoncé and Deborah’s daughter, Millicent, had previously competed against one another in local beauty pageants. When prompted, Beyoncé remembered Millicent. “She’s so pretty. You know her too, Mommy,” she said. Tina smiled vaguely, as if trying to remember.

  “I wanna be in a group too,” Solange piped up, pouting.

  “You’ll get your chance, little girl,” Mathew said, scooping her up into his arms. “When you’re too big for me to do this,” he said, lifting her over his head as she squealed with delight, “then maybe you’ll be ready to be in a group.”

  Phone numbers were exchanged all around.

  In about a week’s time, there was another round of auditions, this one including Beyoncé. “That’s when I met her for the first time,” LaTavia Roberson, who would sing with Beyoncé in Girls Tyme and then Destiny’s Child, recalls. “There were lines and lines of girls, all of us sitting together waiting to sing, dance, rap, and do whatever we could do to convince these ladies [Deborah and Denise] to work with us.” It took some time, but eventually Laday and Seals found the talent they felt they needed for their homespun revue, which, as it would happen, would comprise three acts:

  There was “M-1”—Millicent LaDay, Deborah’s eight-year-old daughter, who acted as a “hype-master,” the girl charged with revving up the crowd and keeping it on its feet.

  Then there was Girls Tyme, the girls’ act featuring Beyoncé Knowles, eight; Staci LaToisen, ten; and Jennifer Young, eleven. This was the singing group that was to be at the center of the revue.

  There was also Destiny, the hip-hop dance troupe consisting of LaTavia Roberson and Chris Lewis, both nine-year-olds. When Deborah and Denise decided to add two more dancers to Destiny, they auditioned and then accepted LaTavia’s cousins Nicki Taylor, eleven, and her sister Nina, eight.

  It was Denise Seals who would train the girls vocally. Though they had singing ability, they were obviously still just children who didn’t yet know how to control their voices. They also didn’t know how to sing harmony. So Denise trained them to listen carefully to each other as they sang so that they could learn to stay on pitch. “Beyoncé picked it all up so fast, it was a little startling,” she recalled—and it should be acknowledged here that Denise would have been Beyoncé’s first vocal coach. “Of the girls in her group, I would have to say that she was most advanced,” she added. “She was a quick study, not afraid to ask questions, and—good Lord!—the questions!” she exclaimed. “Nothing got by her. At the age of eight, she wanted to know all there was to know about singing. I remember walking into rehearsal one day and there she was giving the other girls their parts as if she was the vocal coach. ‘You sing this part,’ she was saying to one of them. ‘Then you sing this part,’ she said to another. ‘If y’all do it right, it’ll be harmony. But if y’all do it wrong, it’ll be terrible.’ I laughed to myself and thought, ‘Okay, so that’s how it’s gonna be with this one, is it?’ ”

  Now that managers Laday and Seals had the personnel of their three acts confirmed, it was time to begin trying to book the revue around town. The way they’d planned and rehearsed the show, the girls would bound onto the stage with a prerecorded announcement, complete with bombastic fanfare music, proclaiming, “Ladies and gentlemen, you are about to experience the ultimate masterpiece: M-1, Destiny, and Girls Tyme!”

  In June 1990, the revue would make its debut at Hobart Taylor Hall at Prairie View A&M University in Prairie View, Texas, during a variety program of local up-and-coming talent. That more than two thousand people showed up to see a gaggle of little girls who were virtually unknown speaks to how successful the enterprising women of D&D Management were in getting the word out about their new charges. “What made the revue so special was that there was no one star,” said Deborah Laday. “That was our vision, to feature all of the girls in one way or the other. We wanted to build their self esteem as much as we did their careers. That was so important to Denise and me. There would be no one star. They were all stars.”

  “I was nine the first time we performed,” Beyoncé has said. (Actually, she was eight.) “I realized then how much I loved being in a group, because I was always so nervous. So to have those girls with me before the stage, during the stage, and after the stage—and we could talk about all of it—was very exciting for me.”

  It wasn’t long before the revue began to play even larger venues such as the AstroWorld amusement park in Houston. “When we played AstroWorld, my gosh, we thought, ‘Okay, now for sure we’ve made the big time,’ ” Nina Taylor recalled. “I remember Beyoncé saying, ‘AstroWorld! It don’t get much bigger than AstroWorld! Just think about it: We can do our show and then go on the Cyclone ride, over and over and over again!’ ”

  “It all fell together quickly,” said LaTavia Roberson. “I think it was, like . . . ‘What? We’re actually going onstage already? That fast?’ Then, when we got out there, it was as if we had no choice but to show the audience what we had to offer. We’d see the smiles and hear the applause and look at each other as if to say, ‘Wow . . . maybe we actually can do this thing!’ It was a baptism by fire, now that I look back on it. We just went out there and made it happen. It was either that or fail, and none of us wanted to fail.”

  One of Deborah Laday’s earliest memories of Beyoncé has to do with what happened when Deborah and Denise scheduled two last-minute performances during a time when the Knowleses were going to be out of town for the weekend. The shows, held in a local park, were hosted by the shoe company Reebok. Beyoncé couldn’t make the first one because she hadn’t yet returned from the family’s vacation. So Staci LaToisen sang her part in the show.

  When she heard that the Knowleses had returned, Deborah telephoned Tina to tell her about the second show. “Oh, but Beyoncé is so tired from the drive,” Tina said, “I don’t know if she can make it.” That was no problem, Deborah told her. She said that Staci would simply sing Beyoncé’s part again. Deborah recalled, “I then heard Tina say, ‘Don’t worry, honey, Staci is going to sing your part like she did for the first show.’ At that point, Beyoncé came on the line and, with this little eight-year-old voice, said, ‘Can you pick me up, Miss Deborah? ’Cause I want to sing my own part.’ I said, ‘But your mommy thinks maybe you’re too tired, Beyoncé.’ She came back with, ‘But I ain’t too tired to sing my part, Miss Deborah! So please come get me, okay?’ ”

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  I actually think women can have it all,” Tina was telling Deborah and Denise. Tina had just gotten back from a vacation in the Bahamas with Mathew and the girls, so she was therefore darker than usual and looking even more exotic, her hair in an elaborate French twist. She said that her mother had always held fast to the philosophy that there were no limits to what a woman could do, and that in this regard she was most definitely ahead of her time. When she was younger, Tina said, she thought it was a tall and maybe even impossible order. As a grown woman, however, she no longer felt that way. Now she believed it could be done. “And,” she concluded, “I’m trying to do it every day.”

  The three women were casually enjoying take-out deli sandwiches in the D&D Management offices during a break in the girls’ rehearsal. In talking to the business partners, Tina came to realize that she had a good deal in common with them.

  First of all, of course, both Deborah and Denise were women of color, both about the same age as Tina.

  Denise, divorced, was raising a son, Chad, thirteen. After having worked for sixteen years for Houston Lighting and Power, she’d just been laid off and had received a nice severance package, much of which was now being used to help finance the all-girls revue. Deborah, who was married, had the one daughter, Millicent. Because she was an accountant for the county by trade, her primary responsibility with D&D Management was to keep the books. As a Brownie troop leader and a former pageant contestant herself, she was also familiar with the local venues available for talent shows. Therefore, she sometimes handled the bookings. Moreover, she knew people from regional record labels whom she’d often bring in to see the girls’ showcases, all in the hope of perhaps securing a contract.

  Deborah and Denise were fascinating counterparts. Deborah was impulsive, blunt, and to the point; she spoke her mind. By contrast, Denise was more careful, measured, and reserved; she was strategic in her thinking. Tina realized early on that both were commanding, independent women who, like herself, had made up their minds that they weren’t going to just devote themselves to their spouses and children at the exclusion of their own pursuits. Maybe it was no coincidence that they’d chosen to form and then mold an all-girls revue; after all, they wanted nothing more than to help young women view themselves in a strong and empowered way. There was nothing wrong with staying at home and raising a family, they agreed. However, there was also nothing wrong with wanting more.