Becoming Beyoncé

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Sitting in the parlor, Denise and Andretta found Beyoncé’s, Ashley’s, LaTavia’s, and Nicki and Nina’s moms: Tina, Carolyn, Cheryl, and Cholotte. Kelly’s mother, Doris, wasn’t present since she now lived in Atlanta. “Most of these moms had been calling me for a week complaining about Mathew possibly taking over and maybe pushing Beyoncé in front, especially Carolyn,” recalled Denise Seals, “and now they were all present. I knew this was going to be a very interesting meeting.”

  Smiling broadly, Mathew walked into the room and greeted all of the women warmly. He was as good-looking as ever. In fact, he seemed to get better with age, with his strong jawline and wide-set eyes behind large, studious-looking glasses. A clean-cut, well-trimmed Afro framed his angular face. Some of the women in the room seemed dazzled by him. All charisma and personality, he was usually hard to resist when he wanted to please, and tonight he definitely wanted to do just that. “I want you to know that I’m now going to be taking a bigger hand in things,” he began. “Ann and I agreed that I’m going to now be co-managing the group.” Denise looked at Andretta for a reaction, but Andretta just stared straight ahead. She hadn’t said one word to Denise about finalizing any sort of co-managing arrangement with Mathew.

  “I have a lot of ideas,” Mathew continued, “and I promise that I will do the best job I can for you and for all of our daughters.” Then he added, “It’s not going to be just Beyoncé, either. It’s going to be Beyoncé and Ashley in the lead.” Carolyn smiled at him and nodded. “I will now give each of you two minutes to say whatever you want to say about me working with Ann. So, which of you would like to go first?”

  Denise stood up and faced Mathew. If any of the women were impressed with him, she had already decided to do her best to disabuse them of that notion. Dressed well in her finely tailored skirt and blouse, she presented herself with just as much style and panache as Mathew. It was usually Deborah who was the outspoken one, and Denise the more strategic. But in Deborah’s absence, Denise would now have to speak for both of them.

  “First of all, I told him it was going to take me longer than just two minutes to say what I had to say,” Denise would recall. “And I said, ‘So, if you’re going to kick me out of your house you may as well do it now.’ Mathew shrugged and extended his hands at me, beckoning me to continue. My first question to him was, ‘How will you coming in as co-manager affect me and Deborah?’ He answered that he would love for me to stay on the team as his assistant. But not Deborah. In fact, he said he didn’t want Deborah to have anything to do with his daughter. I was shocked. I told him that Deborah hadn’t done anything to Beyoncé other than help her try to achieve her goals. ‘Don’t forget,’ I told him, ‘we discovered Beyoncé at the Jewish Community Center. We’re the ones who brought her into Girls Tyme!’ Then, directing my attention to the mothers, I asked if any of them ever felt that either I or Deborah had mistreated their daughters. All of the women looked at Mathew and then back at me with blank faces and didn’t say a word.”

  Now Denise was getting frustrated. “Y’all have been calling me for days, upset because you think this man is taking over, and now y’all have nothing to say?” she asked the moms. Still no reaction. Then, looking at Mathew, she said, “How dare you tell me I can work for you as your assistant. Deborah and I discovered Beyoncé, so you can just kiss my ass if you think I’m going to be working for you!”

  “Excuse me,” Mathew said, struggling to keep his cool. “But Tina and I discovered Beyoncé. She is our daughter.” Plus, he added that Beyoncé didn’t like Deborah. He said that he and Tina, as her parents, had every right to make the decision about to whom she was exposed. “So don’t get it twisted, Denise,” he warned.

  “Deborah and I have a contract with Beyoncé,” Denise shot back. “Don’t you get that twisted, Mathew.” Then, once again addressing the other women, she continued, “This man has you thinking there can be no group without Beyoncé. But I am telling you that this is not the case. You have to have enough faith in your child’s ability to know she can stand on her own without Beyoncé Knowles!” Still nothing. “Look, I don’t want to see Beyoncé go either, but if she leaves,” Denise added, “that does not mean the end of Girls Tyme. Ashley is a very good singer!”

  “But I just said, it’s going to be Beyoncé and Ashley in the lead,” Mathew interjected, his temper rising. “Why are you being so hostile, Denise?”

  “You say that now, but we all know where this thing is headed,” Denise responded. “We all know what you have in mind for your daughter at the expense of the other girls.” She looked at Andretta for help, but Andretta just lowered her eyes. Exasperated, Denise turned to the other women and said she was going to poll them one by one to ask if they were in agreement that Mathew should now be the group’s co-manager. She asked each woman for a simple yes or no. They all answered yes—even Carolyn. Denise didn’t even bother asking Tina. “Well, hell, then, there isn’t anything else for me to say, then, is there?” she asked, discouraged.

  “Guess not,” Mathew said, rising from his chair as he glared at Denise. Bristling, she went back to her seat.

  “I just want to be clear,” Mathew began, again taking charge. He said that if any of the other women present had any problem with anything that was going on, they should feel free to express themselves. No one said a word. He further explained that he had big plans for Girls Tyme, citing more upcoming recording sessions and concerts and a bigger budget for wardrobe. However, he allowed, it was important that they continued to communicate, “because this ain’t no war,” he said, looking directly at Denise. “This is for our daughters. If we’re fightin’ anyone, it’s got to be anyone who wants to keep us out of the record business, not each other.”

  “As the women began to file out of the room, I pulled Tina aside,” Denise recalled. “Because we had always gotten along, I felt I could reason with her. ‘Are you in agreement with what Mathew is doing?’ I asked. Tina didn’t say anything. She just glared at me. I had gone against her husband in a public forum, and she clearly did not appreciate it.”

  After an uncomfortable beat, Denise said, “Fine. Your silence speaks for itself, Tina.” Then she turned and walked out the door with a silent Andretta by her side. On the way back to her home, Andretta remained very quiet, as if she didn’t wish to discuss the meeting.

  Beyoncé’s Hurt Feelings

  In the days after the contentious parents’ meeting at her home, Beyoncé seemed not only distracted but uninterested in going to rehearsal at Andretta’s. Usually she was the first to show up. Now she was missing practice. She was only ten, so who knows what childhood problem she might have been dealing with? When she was unhappy about something, she would usually retire to her room and not be seen for a couple of days. Mathew and Tina gave her the space to do so, even sacrificing schoolwork if necessary. They knew she was a brooder, that even as a child she needed time to sort through confusing feelings. She had a lot on her plate for a youngster, and no doubt felt a great sense of duty where Girls Tyme was concerned, especially after the revelatory Sausalito sessions. She must have felt it was her responsibility not only to sing well but also to make sure the other girls had their vocal parts down. “She’s such a deep thinker for a little girl,” was how Tina put it at the time. Complicating matters, Beyoncé didn’t have the normal recreational outlets of other girls her age. It wasn’t as if she could just go out and play with her friends to distract herself. Her only friends were the other singers in Girls Tyme, and although she had fun with them, it was still work. Sometimes Kelly and Solange would go into Beyoncé’s room to see if she wanted to talk and would find her lying on her bed intently studying publicity photos of Girls Tyme. It was as if the group was her entire life.

  Some people who knew her at that time feel that Beyoncé may have overheard the heated conversation that had taken place at the meeting in the Knowleses’ living room. It was entirely possible. When a person walked into the Knowleses’ home on Parkwood, the first
thing he would see was the staircase that led to the second floor. If he made a sharp left, he would find himself in the living room. A sharp right would take him to the family room. From either vantage point, it would be impossible to see anyone sitting on the staircase. Many years later, Beyoncé would say that she and Kelly would sometimes sit on those stairs and listen in on conversations being had by adults in either room. Had Beyoncé overheard the argument about whether Mathew should become its co-manager or whether or not the group could continue without her?

  If so, one can’t help but wonder about the long-term effects that hearing such an argument about her would have on a child. After all, Beyoncé had never asked to be the center of attention. If the trend had turned toward making her the lead singer of the group, it wasn’t by her own design. It hadn’t been Mathew’s idea to feature Beyoncé either, though he did touch upon the idea from time to time.

  Two weeks after that difficult meeting. Tina invited Andretta and her boys, Armon and Chris, to the house to talk things over. Tina enjoyed preparing her specialty gumbo whenever the Tillmans came over for dinner, which was just about every Sunday.

  “When we got together at the Knowleses, it was fun, not business,” Armon Tillman recalled. “It was family. My mom and Tina were good friends, and my mom had a rapport with Mathew, even though sometimes it didn’t seem that way. She was unhappy about the co-management deal, for sure, but she definitely accepted it. It wasn’t like they were always fighting. They went off to the den to talk business while Tina and us kids stayed in the living room and played games.

  “After my mom and Mathew were finished with business, Mathew and I went out to his basketball court to play one-on-one. Man, was he ever competitive! Usually older guys will give a kid a break, you know? Not Mathew Knowles. He played hard and he played to win, even if he was playing against me, a ninth grader. In months to come, we would have a lot of talks while playing ball. He was just so interesting. You had to hand it to him, because he was a black man living the American dream making good money and raising his family in this big ol’ house. He told me so many stories that inspired me about his growing up, the challenges he faced as a black man in the South, the way he had dealt with racism. He made me feel I could achieve anything in my life. My father died when I was about six, so, with Mathew, I sort of hung on to every word. Besides all of that, we also had a lot of fun in his house, too.

  “At one point, Beyoncé thought Chris had done something to her—I can’t remember what it was—and she came racing down the steps from the second floor. ‘You punk!’ she screamed at my brother. ‘I hate you!’ All of us—Tina, Mathew, me, Chris, Kelly, and my mom—were looking at her like, ‘What in the world is wrong with this girl?’ And then, before anyone could stop her, she ran right up to Chris, who was just standing there with his hands in his pockets, and kicked him right in the nuts! The poor kid fell right to his knees like a sack of potatoes. ‘Beyoncé! Why did you do that?’ Tina screamed out. After we sorted it all out, Beyoncé realized that Chris hadn’t in fact done what she thought he’d done. ‘Then you need to apologize to Chris,’ Tina said, and of course, Beyoncé did just that. As an adult, Chris would laugh about the fact that he once got kicked in the nuts by Beyoncé at her momma’s house.”

  “Beyoncé’s gonna be a star one day,” Mathew said, pulling her up on his lap.

  “All of the girls in Girls Tyme are stars,” Andretta hastened to add.

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Mathew responded. When Andretta continued to insist that all of the girls were special, Mathew shrugged. “If you say so,” he told her, not caring to discuss it any further. At that point, Beyoncé jumped off her dad’s lap and, seeming uncomfortable with the conversation, left the room quickly, saying she wanted to go and play with the other kids.

  After a couple of days, Mathew and Tina managed to straighten things out with Beyoncé. She was back at rehearsal. “Whatever was going on just made her stronger,” said one person who knew her well at the time. “It motivated her. Her parents propped her up, got her through it, and then she just plowed forward. She was that kind of girl. I don’t know how, at the age of ten, she got it in her head to take adversity and use it as motivation. She just loved singing too much to let anyone stop her from doing it. Whatever the case, one thing was sure: There was just no stopping this kid. I remember her telling me, ‘People can say what they want about me, I’m still gonna sing.’ ”

  For his part, Mathew was unrepentant about the way the meeting had gone. After all, he already had a very well-paying job, one at which he excelled. He certainly didn’t need to spend his spare time co-managing his daughter’s little singing group. He did it because he wanted to help Beyoncé make her dreams come true. If the parents and creative team took issue with him, that wasn’t his concern. He wasn’t out to make friends, he was out to make his kid a star—because he knew that it was what she wanted. “If she had told me she wanted to be a doctor, I would have said, ‘Fine,’ and I would have figured out a way to buy her a hospital,” he once concluded. “I knew what my job was as a parent, and that was to support my girl’s dream.”

  Mathew Taking Over?

  Now, I’m not even sure it was such a good idea to go to that darn talent show at the Jewish Community Center,” Deborah Laday said after she heard about the contentious meeting at Mathew’s to which she had not been invited. She didn’t mean it, of course. It’s just that the day she and Denise Seals discovered Beyoncé was remembered by both as having been so momentous, it was difficult to believe how much things had deteriorated. Here the partners were at a definite crossroads, and all because of their big discovery—Beyoncé.

  It was at this point that Deborah decided to bow out. “All I can say is that if I had stayed one second longer, I would have gone down in history as the gal who shot Beyoncé’s daddy,” she recalled. “Mathew was destroying my and Denise’s original vision, which was that there should be no one featured star in the group. We wanted all of the girls to shine. He and I had a fight about it. I had a little temper on me at the time and told him to go to hell. Then, I was done. I told Denise and Ann both, ‘Ya’ll do ya’ll’s thing. Good luck with him. I’m gone.’ It was as if I could look into the future and see a whole world of trouble I didn’t want in my life. So, whatever little part I had in Beyoncé’s early career, I’m happy to have done,” she concluded. “I’m very proud of her. But her father? No. Sorry. Not for me.”

  After Deborah was gone, the official announcement was made by Andretta and Mathew. “Miss Ann called us all together for a meeting at Mathew’s house,” recalled Nina Taylor. “We all sat around the big dining room table, wondering what this was about. ‘From now on, Mathew is going to be helping out as my co-manager,’ Miss Ann said. And we looked at him and he was smiling, and our whole thing as little kids was, ‘Great. Cool. The more help, the better. He’s with us all the time anyway, so why not?’ In the back of my mind, though, I have to admit, I was also thinking, ‘Hmmm . . . I wonder what this is gonna mean?’ ”

  “I remember Mathew saying something like, ‘Ya’ll need to make the best of this situation now, because I don’t know how much longer ya’ll will be together,’ recalled Nina’s sister, Nicki. “One of you might leave for a solo career. Who knows? That’s what happens with groups. One girl becomes the star and she leaves, and that’s the end of that.” I thought, “Oh no! We all kind of looked at each other with big eyes, not sure what he meant.”

  The first order of business for Mathew was to relocate group rehearsals to his home. Most of the girls lived closer to the Knowleses’ spacious two-story home on Houston’s south side than to Andretta’s on the north side, LaTavia and Kelly being the exceptions. Mathew had already discussed it with LaTavia’s mother, Cheryl, and she agreed to get LaTavia to the Knowleses’ on time for practice every day. However, Andretta argued that getting Kelly there meant that she would have to drive her, which promised to be a daily inconvenience. Sometimes Nicki and Nina’s mom
, Cholotte, would pick up Kelly and take her, but it was always a hassle seeing to it that she was present for practices.

  Andretta’s concern was obvious: Moving the whole operation to Mathew’s house when it had always been at hers felt like a power play on his part. The fact remained, though, that the majority of those involved with rehearsals did live closer to Mathew. Therefore, in the end he would prevail—rehearsals were moved to his home, into the family room to the right of the entryway. It was carpeted and had recessed lighting, which seemed to make it the perfect place to practice. A large leather couch took up one entire wall, and there were sliding glass doors that led out to a patio. There was plenty of room for all six girls to rehearse, usually in their stocking feet.

  Outside, in the backyard, Mathew would soon build a large wooden deck that would be used as a makeshift stage. “My dad got a Casio [sound machine] and little mikes and we would go in the backyard and practice all day,” Beyoncé once recalled. Kelly added, “I didn’t want to go outside and play. I wanted to go outside and pick up a microphone.”

  “Okay. Question,” Mathew would say after the girls would finish a song. “What are we singing about? What is this song about?” He actually was very good with the girls, trying his best to get them to connect with the songs they were performing.

  At his home, Mathew also continued with the girls’ artistic development. “I came up with this idea we called a boot camp,” he explained many years later. (He seemed to have forgotten that, at least from all available evidence, this concept was actually Lonnie Jackson and Tony Mo.’s.) Mathew continued, “We did choreography and vocal lessons and team building and we jogged for physical fitness. That’s what we did all day.”

  History would bear out that it had been a pretty good idea to have the girls rehearse at the Knowles home. In fact, they seemed to thrive there, even if Mathew pushed them hard. “The girls could never have relaxing or downtime,” recalled Beyoncé’s cousin Ronald Thomas. “They were kids, but Mathew would talk to them like they were in their twenties. We were always teasing him. I would call him ‘Joe Jackson’ ”—the patriarch of the Jackson family, who notoriously ruled over his sons with an iron fist and transformed them into the Jackson 5.