Becoming Beyoncé

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  “Sometimes it’s a madhouse, though, isn’t it?” Denise asked Tina. “Trying to keep home and office straight?”

  Tina threw her head back and laughed. “Yes,” she said, “but I’m a list-maker, and that helps me cut through all the unnecessary bullshit.” Tina’s language would always be colorful, and she would never apologize for it, either. She added that for her it was all about organization and prioritization, that there was simply no other way. She said that if she left it up to Mathew, the family would probably live in complete and utter chaos. He was more cavalier about the scheduling of his day, Tina said, whereas she was more structured. Her business, she concluded, “ran like clockwork.” But still, she allowed, Mathew was a very good provider. “We’re actually an amazing team,” she concluded.

  Within a few years after Beyoncé’s birth, Mathew and Tina were financially secure enough to purchase a large, impressive-looking four-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bathroom home with a two-car garage at 3346 Parkwood Drive in Houston’s Third Ward. It was an upper-middle-class, mostly integrated neighborhood. “Me and Beyoncé grew up in an area called Third Ward Texas,” Solange Knowles once confirmed for a VH1 documentary about Destiny’s Child. “There were all of these African-American families, most of them doctors and judges.”

  At work, Mathew remained competitive and successful. A framed correspondence from Xerox was proudly displayed on the family’s fireplace mantel, congratulating him for winning the Salesman of the Year award in 1986 as a result of “being 100 percent or better in each performance category, and generating over $2 million in revenue. You have unquestionably earned the coveted Sales Representative of the Year for the third time in the last four years,” it proclaimed. It concluded, “Your sustained excellence in achievement has set an example for everyone associated with Xerox Medical Systems.”

  As Mathew stayed busy with his burgeoning career, Tina remained at the helm of her hairstyling business, Headliners. Though her husband was pretty much a loner, Tina enjoyed a wide circle of friends. A member of the congregation of St. John’s United Methodist Church, she was involved in all sorts of activities there. She was anything but a stay-at-home mom. “In fact, they had a lady who cleaned their house for them,” Nicki Taylor recalled, “and I remember as a kid thinking, ‘Wow, that’s really something.’ You didn’t see a lot of that in our world at that time. I think Tina made a decision early on that she was not going to be remembered as the wife of a man who did something great with his life. She wanted to do something great too.”

  Despite their great ambition, though, Tina, Deborah, and Denise agreed that no matter what activities unfolded for them outside of their roles as wives and mothers, nothing was worth sacrificing their domestic lives for. If her family suffered because of D&D Management, Deborah said, then D&D Management would just have to go. Denise wholeheartedly agreed. Tina said she felt the same about Headliners. “It’s ironic,” she opined, “that as much as we want to have it all as today’s black women, it always goes back to the same family values we’ve all held for generations. We’d give it all up, every last bit of it, for family, wouldn’t we?”

  “Family first,” Deborah said, raising her soft drink bottle.

  “Yes,” Tina and Denise agreed, smiling. They clinked Deborah’s bottle with their own. “Family first.”

  Andretta

  Without a doubt, one of the most important figures in the professional career of Beyoncé Knowles was a woman whose great contribution has gone largely unrecognized: Andretta Brown Tillman. Born on March 31, 1958, the eighth of twelve children to Jimmy and Effie Lee Brown in the small town of Whitehouse, Texas, Andretta was an attractive and stylish petite black woman. With her engaging personality and uncanny work ethic, she was popular and well known in her community. Only a few close friends of hers, such as her most trusted confidant, Brian Kenneth Moore—known as Kenny—knew the truth about her. “Sometimes it took every bit of strength she could muster just to get through the day,” reflected Moore. “She’d been through a lot and suffered some personal and unspeakable tragedies in her personal life.”

  Andretta married Dwight Ray Tillman on December 3, 1977, in Whitehouse, at just nineteen. Dwight was twenty-two. Joyous at the thought of their entire lives ahead of them, they happily settled into a small house in Houston, where Dwight would teach at Booker T. Washington High School. Andretta had wanted to work in television as a news anchor, but this was to become a dream deferred when she became pregnant. Her first son, Armon Roshaud, was born in 1980, and then in 1982 came Christopher Raynard. Meanwhile, thanks to Dwight’s steady income as well as Andretta’s from the Houston Lighting and Power Company, the family was soon able to move into a larger, two-story home in affluent Cypress. In 1984, the Tillman family was completed with the happy arrival of a baby girl they named Shawna Marie.

  Though Dwight was a mathematics teacher, he also fancied himself an up-and-coming musical entrepreneur in the fashion of the legendary Berry Gordy Jr. Actually, the manner by which Gordy had built his iconic Motown empire in the late 1950s and into the 1960s had inspired African Americans all over the world. As the civil rights movement influenced the scope of what black people thought possible in their lives and in those of their children, Gordy instituted a sort of automobile assembly-line strategy in Detroit as a model for his own self-mobilized venture, Motown Record Corporation. His artists—such as Diana Ross and the Supremes, the Temptations, the Miracles, and Stevie Wonder—were groomed by mandatory classes in music, choreography, etiquette, and fashion. This was the way Dwight envisioned his own music empire one day, and he shared that dream with Andretta.

  In August 1986, Dwight, now thirty-one, decided the time was right to devote himself fully to his ambitions as a talent manager and possibly record producer. Therefore, he left his teaching position. By October, he’d already made several contacts and had his sights set on several bands in Tyler, Texas. He was fully ready to embark on this next phase of his and Andretta’s life together. Of course, Andretta stood firmly behind him, anxious to support him in any way possible. It was not meant to be, though. On October 26, 1986, the Tillman family was involved in a horrendous automobile accident in Tyler. The vehicle in which they’d been traveling was hit on the driver’s side by a drunk motorist, “spinning the car completely around,” as Andretta’s brother, Lornanda—known as To-to—would recall it, “and smashing it like a sardine can.”

  “I heard that the boys, Armon and Chris, were thrown from the car,” added Andretta’s best friend, Pat Felton, “though they may have been pulled from the wreckage by a passerby. Dwight was not so lucky; he was killed instantly behind the wheel. Ann happened to have had Shawna on her lap; the infant was smashed into her chest. Though paramedics revived Shawna, she died at the scene.”

  To-to was at his sister’s side at her hospital bed when the doctors gave Andretta the terrible news that her husband and baby daughter had been killed. “There’s no way to express the devastation,” he said. “How do you put that kind of pain into words. There’s no way . . .”

  “Ann was hurt so badly, she could barely attend the funerals because of her injuries,” continued Pat Felton. She blamed herself for the accident, because she was the one who had wanted to go to Tyler for the holiday, not Dwight. I used to tell her, ‘Ann, God just takes people. You can’t be held responsible. Nobody is in control.’ ”

  As if fate hadn’t already dealt Andretta Tillman enough hardship, within two years of this tragedy she was diagnosed with lupus erythematosus, the autoimmune disease that affects skin, joints, organs, and blood vessels. There was no cure. “This was really a cruel twist,” recalled her nephew Belfrey Brown (his father and Andretta were siblings). “How much more could she take? She was only twenty-eight. But she knew she had to go on for her boys. She wasn’t going to let it get to her. Her first reaction to the diagnosis was, ‘Screw this! I don’t want to know nothin’ about no lupus.’ Really, that’s how she looked at it; she wouldn’t accept it in he
r life. Still, she would suffer for years to come, especially when she was under stress—that’s when she would have the worst lupus crises. It was bad all around, but my aunt had a kind of courage I don’t think I’ve ever seen in anyone else.”

  The void in Andretta’s life left by Dwight’s death was so great that she didn’t know quite what to do with herself. She just knew that she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life grieving over her late husband while obsessing over her illness. One day, almost as if in some sort of predestined way, she received a telephone call from a friend with whom she attended the Yale Street Baptist Church—Denise Seals. Andretta was aware that Denise had formed a management company with her close friend Deborah Laday, called D&D Management. Denise told her that she had a revue she and Deborah were managing in the Houston area. The acts in it were unpolished, she explained, but there was still something compelling about them. She wondered if perhaps Andretta might be willing to invest in the talent, or maybe even help manage them.

  In fact, Andretta—who was still employed by Houston Lighting and Power—knew precious little about show business. Her son Armon recalled, “She knew my dad had wanted to change the world like Berry Gordy, and she started thinking that maybe his dream could, or should, now become hers. She thought, ‘Well, look, I have the resources, I have the time, and I have my husband’s dream. . . Maybe I should try to do something with all of it.’ That was very much like my mom, ready to take on the world. So she bought a book called Music Industry 101 and she studied it night and day learning what she could, as fast as she could. That’s basically all she had: this doggone book, my dad’s dream, some ambition . . . and a whole lot of hope.”

  Andretta immediately became interested in a group her brother To-to had started called Tayste, four excellent singers and dancers in the tradition of the male groups popular at that time, such as Boyz II Men. The group also consisted of Harlon Bell, known by his middle name, Keith, who was eighteen and fresh out of high school in Tyler, as well as his brother, Mitchell, and their cousin Alaric Jordan. They ranged in age from eighteen to twenty-two. To-to, who had recently obtained an honorable discharge from the Air Force, convinced Andretta to put a little of her money behind Tayste just to see what might happen. “It was as if all of these coincidences were coming together in a divine way to sort of push my sister into show business,” he recalled.

  “She had gotten about half a million dollars from Dwight’s life insurance policy,” Pat Felton recalled, “and about another $40,000 from a different settlement relating to the accident. This was a lot of money. While she was weighing Denise’s offer, she started to think that maybe something good could happen as a result of something very bad. She thought Dwight would be happy if she used the money for something he might have wanted. Therefore, she started Tillman Management with the goal of managing singing groups in the Houston area. It was a natural fit. First of all, she was brilliant. She was articulate. She was always well dressed and looked great. I believed she could go very far in show business as a manager.”

  “You have to see these girls, Ann,” Keith Bell told Andretta one morning over breakfast. “I just checked them out at the Sharpstown Mall [in Houston]. They are so good I’ve decided to work with them, teach them some routines.”

  “But how good can they be?” Andretta asked. “They’re just kids, right?”

  “That’s what makes them so incredible,” Keith explained. “And they have this girl named Beyoncé. She’s wild, Ann. You won’t believe it when you see her.”

  “How old is she?”

  “I don’t know. Eight or nine?”

  “Oh my God,” Andretta exclaimed. “Eight or nine? I don’t know, Keith. That is really young.”

  It was the summer of 1990, and Keith Bell was trying to sell Andretta Tillman on the all-girls revue Denise Seals had previously mentioned to her. “I was already the choreographer for Tayste,” recalled Bell. “Then, when Denise and Deborah started D&D Management, I became their in-house choreographer. So I was just this young and determined kid dancer anxious to help them make things happen.”

  “I think they need money, Ann,” Keith said. “Maybe you could back them or something? Would you at least meet with them?”

  “Well, okay, I’ll meet with them,” Andretta said, with no small amount of hesitation. “But I can’t promise anything. I’ll call Denise and set up a meeting.”

  A few days later, Andretta did as promised: She called Denise, who arranged a meeting with Deborah at the D&D Management office. When Denise finally introduced Andretta to Deborah, the chemistry between the two women was instantaneous. Andretta, with her dazzling smile and dancing brown eyes, made an immediate impression. In fact, the three women seemed a great team from the very beginning. They were about the same age, each in their early thirties, each an independent, formidable African-American woman with a desire to do something unusual with her life—to be in the show business management game.

  After Andretta agreed to invest, Deborah said that what mattered most to her was that the three of them worked together as a team. She suggested that they always have each other’s backs, because “who knows what we’ll be up against out there? This is a dirty business,” she concluded, “but as a team I know we can do it if we just stick together. Agreed, ladies?”

  The three women shook hands; they had a deal.

  Ninth Birthday

  It was Tuesday night, September 4, 1990, in Dallas.

  “But what do you mean, I can’t see Beyoncé?” Tina Knowles was asking. “Of course I can see my child.”

  “I’m sorry, but there’s no way,” responded a very distracted Deborah Laday. Deborah had a lot on her mind while backstage at a community center. As she busily fielded questions from stagehands about sound and lighting cues, anxious little girls tugged on her skirt and wondered about the songs they were about to sing. Meanwhile, parents, like Tina, were demanding to see their daughters to wish them luck before their performance. Still, despite all of the chaos, Deborah managed to comport herself with calm authority. “Look, Beyoncé is fixin’ to perform,” she told Tina. “Plus, I’m trying to keep this area back here clear!”

  “But this is her birthday. She’s nine today!” Tina exclaimed. Though Tina was now thirty-six years old, she looked far younger, maybe in her early twenties. Her light brown skin still had a youthful, luminescent quality. Her hair was curly and chestnut-colored, now styled in a short, jazzy bob. Her makeup was expertly done, her favorite shade of red lipstick framing a full and dazzling smile, light blue eye shadow above green eyes. According to photos taken that evening, she was wearing a white blouse, sleeves cut at elbow length, with white silk pants and a large gold metallic belt cinching her waist. Long, dangly earrings matched her belt. Clutching her hand was four-year-old Solange, now a cute little tyke in pigtails. Tina would recall this evening with vivid clarity in a sworn deposition and subsequent affidavit she would give twelve years later, in 2002.

  “Tina, you don’t get it,” Deborah said, an edge to her tone. “The moments before a big show are crucial.” She added that Beyoncé needed to focus and couldn’t risk any distractions. She suggested that Tina wait until after the show to see her. “I hope that’s okay,” Deborah said apologetically. As she rushed off, she said that she hated to be so short, but that she had a job to do and she needed to get back to it

  Tina wasn’t used to being told no. In fact, she could probably count on one hand the times she’d accepted it as an answer. She seemed to have met her match in Deborah, though, and she didn’t much like it. Although they’d started off on a nice footing, Tina would take a dim view of Deborah after this day, and once Tina Knowles had her mind made up about someone, it was difficult to move her from that viewpoint. Now silently seething, she stood in the hallway leading to the dressing room where the girls could be heard noisily changing into their costumes. Meanwhile, ticket holders began to stream into the five-hundred-seat auditorium. They’d come to see the free show hosted by
Deborah and Denise, their so-called ultimate masterpiece: M-1, Destiny, and Girls Tyme.

  As Tina stood in the hallway debating whether to heed Deborah’s advice or just go ahead and find her daughter, she heard a voice behind her. “How can I help you?” It was Andretta Tillman. After making her acquaintance, Tina explained to Andretta the problem at hand. With a warm smile, Andretta said she absolutely agreed with her. “A mother should be able to see her child on such an important day,” she said. She then suggested that Tina follow her; she would take her back to see her little girl.

  Tina followed Andretta behind a curtain and down a long hallway, holding Solange’s hand the entire way. “The kids are in there,” Andretta told her when they finally reached a room at the end of the hall. “Obviously,” Tina said with a chuckle. One could plainly hear gales of laughter on the other side of the door.

  After Andretta opened the door, Tina and Solange walked in and quickly surveyed the room in search of Beyoncé. They found her sitting alone in front of a mirror gazing at her reflection. Her dark brown hair, parted in the middle, fell into long pigtails with russet-brown silk ribbons on both sides of her head. Wearing gold lamé pants and a white blouse, she was an adorable, very small girl with light skin and perfect features. As soon as she saw their image reflected in the mirror, she whirled around. “Mommy! Solange!” she exclaimed as she jumped to her feet. After she ran to her mother and sister, they all embraced in a group hug. “We just wanted to come back and wish you a happy birthday, Beyoncé,” Tina said, kneeling down to the child’s level. “And good luck!” She bussed her on the forehead. When Solange asked if she was nervous, Beyoncé shook her head and simply answered, “Nope.”