Carolyn turned and explained to her confused daughter that she would have to leave Girls Tyme and sing on her own from then on. “It’s going to be okay, I know it is,” she said.
“What happened?” Beyoncé wanted to know, back at Andretta’s. “Why is everyone so mad? Did we do something wrong?” By this time, Mathew had gone into the kitchen to cool off. Beyoncé was standing in the living room with Nicki, Nina, LaTavia, and Kelly at her side.
“No one’s mad,” Tina said. She didn’t really want to discuss it. She just asked the girls to gather their things so they could all leave.
“But Mrs. Davis sounded awful mad to me,” Nicki said. “Is everything okay?”
“What did I just tell you, Beyoncé?” Tina said, ignoring Nicki. “It’s time to go.”
“Wait a minute,” Beyoncé said, holding her ground. “This is our group! We deserve to know what the heck is going on.”
“Yeah, this ain’t right,” Nina agreed.
Such a mutiny was rare. Usually the girls didn’t question the adults’ role in their young lives. Like most children, they just accepted that the grown-ups knew what they were doing and wouldn’t steer them wrong. How else could it be? Were they to just manage themselves? Things were changing, though, now that the girls were becoming old enough to question their parents’ decisions. Beyoncé in particular was becoming much more headstrong, especially where Mathew was concerned. At rehearsals, for instance, Mathew and Nicki would often butt heads. “It’s not supposed to be that way, it’s this way,” Mathew would tell her. Nicki would stand up to him and hold her ground. Then, inevitably, Beyoncé would side with Nicki. “No, Daddy, Nicki is right. You’re wrong,” she would tell him, and she would think nothing of doing so, either. Actually, contradicting her father had become par for the course with Beyoncé these days. Though still completely devoted to one another, father and daughter had begun to disagree on the creative side of things. Not surprisingly, nothing annoyed Mathew more than when Beyoncé sassed him. “I know you ain’t talking back to me up in here, Beyoncé,” he’d always tell her. She’d just shrug her shoulders as if to say, “Yeah, well . . . whatever.” As she matured, she was becoming a very willful and outspoken girl.
Now the four little singers stood before Tina, their little arms defiantly crossed in front of them. “I thought we were gonna practice a new song,” Kelly said.
“Now, how y’all gonna practice a new song when Ashley’s not even here?” Tina asked. “Come on, Beyoncé and Kelly, please do as you’re told. I mean it.”
Chagrined, Beyoncé and Kelly said goodbye to their friends, hugging each one tightly and vowing that they would all see each other tomorrow after school. The two then walked out of the house, trailing behind Tina and looking miserable. Soon after, Mathew came out of the kitchen and followed them.
An Important Lesson
What? No! But that ain’t right!” Beyoncé exclaimed the next day when told of Ashley’s departure from Girls Tyme. The rest of the team was also present at rehearsal when Andretta broke the news to the girls. “She didn’t even tell us she was leaving,” Beyoncé protested. “How come she didn’t tell us?”
“That’s just the way it worked out,” Andretta said.
“Well, I’m calling her,” Beyoncé said. When she said she wanted to hear the news directly from Ashley, Andretta wasn’t sure how to proceed. She suggested that Beyoncé should take up the matter with Mathew.
Though she understood that Beyoncé was upset about Ashley, Andretta had her own challenges in that regard. What she’d gone through with the deaths of her husband and child had changed her in many profound ways, not the least of which was that she was adverse to losing people in her life. She didn’t like to say goodbye. She definitely didn’t want to see Ashley leave the act, and the only way she could live with it was to offer the girl a solo management deal. It was her way of keeping Ashley around. Mathew had to sign off on it, too, which he did. For whatever reason, though—and there are likely many of them—Ashley would not blossom under this new arrangement. “It’s just something you deal with and move on,” her father, Nolan Davis, would in years to come say of this time in his daughter’s career.
“I will ask my dad,” Beyoncé said before storming from the room, followed by Kelly and LaTavia. “You bet I will,” she hollered out from the other room.
When Beyoncé spoke to Mathew, he laid it on the line for her. Carolyn Davis had other ideas for Ashley and had pulled her from the group, plain and simple. It was not his decision. Beyoncé wanted more details, but Mathew didn’t give them. He said he was handling everything and that she shouldn’t be concerned. When she said she wanted to speak to Ashley, Mathew told her not to do so, at least not at that moment. He said he wanted everyone to have a chance to calm down. As much as it bothered her, Andretta supported Mathew’s idea for a clean break. In the end, Beyoncé didn’t call Ashley.
It would seem that Beyoncé and her friends were in the midst of learning an important lesson about show business: There’s little room in it for sentiment. True, the girls had worked together for years, enjoyed their victories, and suffered through their defeats as if they were true blood relations. However, when it came to Girls Tyme, a friend—or a “sister”—was only one for as long as she fell in line with managerial decisions. If she fell out of favor, she could easily exit the group without warning. This was a business, not a family, even if Tina had attempted to paint it that way. If there was any emotion attached to losing Ashley as a friend, it would have to be buried, and stay that way. This was the first time Beyoncé would bear witness to such a stark reality, but it wouldn’t be the last.
“We never even saw Ashley again,” said Nina Taylor. “She was just gone, as if she’d fallen off the face of the earth. All of those years together . . . over. Just like that. Done.”
“Anytime one of us said we were going to call Ashley, either Miss Ann or Mathew told us not to,” Nicki Taylor recalled. “ ‘Ashley is doing her thing and you’re doing your thing,’ they said. Eventually, we stopped asking about her. We even stopped talking about her amongst ourselves. We somehow got it that we could not look back, that we had to keep moving forward. I remember Beyoncé saying something like, ‘My dad says we have to focus on the present, not the past.’ And that’s what we did. As kids, you listen to what your elders say, at least we did. We felt that what Mathew and Miss Ann said was law.”
After she left Girls Tyme, Ashley continued working with Tony Mo. and recorded at least another forty songs with him. In 2004, she would audition again for Star Search, and would again be defeated. However, she would soon begin working with Prince, and in 2006 would successfully tour with him, using her middle and last names—Támar Davis—to promote his album 3121. On that record, she and Prince would cowrite and record a duet, “Beautiful, Loved and Blessed,” which would go on to be nominated for a Grammy. She’d also record a couple of very good solo albums, and also act in several Tyler Perry productions. Most recently, she toured with Motown the Musical, playing several different characters, including the starring role of Diana Ross.
In Girls Tyme, a pretty twelve-year-old named LeToya Nicole Luckett, who happened to be a classmate of Beyoncé’s, quickly replaced Ashley Davis. Andretta’s assistant, Sha Sha Daniels, selected her photo out of a binder of pictures and résumés given to her to thumb through by her boss. “She sure has some big hair, that one,” Andretta said when Sha Sha showed her the girl she’d chosen. “I’ll bet the other girls will pick on her for that.” Sha Sha laughed. “We can press it out, no problem,” she said. “She’s so cute. I think she’ll work out great.”
Born on March 11, 1981, in Houston, LeToya was the oldest of two children. She grew up singing in her local church, performing her first solo at the age of five. Mathew may have thought he had his hands full with Ashley’s mom, Carolyn, but he would find LeToya’s mother, Pamela, to be just as formidable. She was her daughter’s biggest advocate and, as would soon be revealed, also h
ad very specific ideas about the way she wanted LeToya’s career to unfold.
“When LeToya came into the group, we sort of tried to forget that Ashley had ever been a part of us,” concluded Nina Taylor. “But in the backs of our minds, we were thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, if it could happen to her . . .’ ”
Desperate Times
Even though Mathew and Tina Knowles have talked publicly about the struggle of subsidizing Beyoncé’s career when she was young, they’ve been very careful never to let it appear that while they were doing so they were in dire financial straits. In fact, they’ve often spoke of not being “like the Jacksons,” the famous and talented family from Gary, Indiana, who faced great poverty and were, as a result of hard work and no shortage of good luck, able to leverage the success of five of their sons into financial salvation. Or as Mathew told reporter Jamie Foster Brown, “Tina and I were not sitting around saying, ‘Wow, I hope our kids become successful so they can change our lives.’ ” Beyoncé has concurred that a Jacksons-like saga was never the Knowleses’ story (except for that both fathers—Knowles and Jackson—made sacrifices for their children). “It wasn’t about me being in show business for the money,” she has said. Of course, the Knowleses had been living a good life in the 1980s when Mathew was working steadily. However, it would appear that the family was having at least some financial pressures before Mathew even quit his job at the end of 1992, since public records show a federal tax lien filed against them as early as March 1, 1990, for $11,419.
Every family in the public eye has to make a choice in terms of how much of their private lives they wish to reveal and what will ultimately service the image they are hoping to project. Beyoncé’s image has always been wholesome, fresh, and somehow upwardly mobile—certainly not troubled, not gritty, not steeped in adversity. Considering the Jackson family once again, though the Jackson 5 were a scrubbed-clean Motown confection, the family and their record company never tried to hide its gritty urban roots. The family’s dire financial situation was a big part of its success story. After all, “rags to riches” always works. It’s the oldest trick in the book.
The Knowleses made their own decision when it came to their family’s history and how it would inform the way the public viewed “Beyoncé” the brand. They would turn away from their struggle, bury it in the past, and refer to it only occasionally, and even then downplay it significantly. While part of the reason they persisted in this stance has to do with show business image-making, some of it can also be chalked up to plain old southern pride and decorum. In their view, why should anyone know anything more than what the Knowleses had chosen to reveal about their personal finances? However, fully understanding the gravity of their financial situation in the 1990s certainly doesn’t diminish them. Quite the contrary, it only serves to more fully illuminate the scope of the extreme sacrifice both Mathew and Tina felt obligated to make for a daughter who would one day become world famous.
Besides pride, a bigger reason for their choices has to do with the building of “Beyoncé” as a show business brand. It has to do with how a carefully constructed mythology about her family’s background might serve Beyoncé Knowles’s public image. Unlike the Jacksons, the Knowleses never wanted to be perceived as lower-class or impoverished. It was as if their strategy when Beyoncé became famous was to wipe the slate clean and start over again in their messaging to the public. In terms of public relations, they wanted to be frozen in time as the upper-middle-class family they’d been in the 1980s before their lives took such a dramatic turn for the worse.
The truth was that the early 1990s were full of financial adversity for the Knowleses. By 1992, Tina’s business, Headliners, had begun to suffer as a result of a poor economy. Because Mathew was no longer bringing in a steady paycheck, the pressure to maintain the family’s standard of living became much more difficult to manage after he quit his job.
During a 2002 deposition in a legal case having to do with their finances, Tina would be forced to address this challenging time in her and her husband’s lives. “Do you recall that a federal lien was applied on your taxes for every year—’92, ’93, ’94, and ’95—because you were unable to pay your federal taxes?” attorney Benjamin Hall would ask her. “These were liens put against us, yes,” Tina confirmed. “But this is not saying that we didn’t pay our taxes. Discrepancies were found in the returns and they came back and did audits and put liens. That’s different from not paying your taxes. And yes, I think we were negligent,” she would concede. “I think we were young and supporting other things other than taking care of our own stuff. Such as Destiny’s Child. Spending all our money on Destiny’s Child.” (Of course, she was referring to the groups that came before the one that would ultimately be named Destiny’s Child in 1997.) “That’s what I will admit to,” Tina concluded, suggesting that there were other aspects of her past that she would just as soon conceal, and this was in a private deposition under oath, not a press interview for public consumption.
Tina in particular had a serious tax problem having to do with Headliners, which actually caused the Knowleses to have to file for bankruptcy in 1993. It was a decision they didn’t take lightly, especially given the way Mathew’s father had raised his son to put a premium on what he called “A-1 credit.” The Knowleses’ tax attorney, David Peake, had also warned them that their home at 3346 Parkwood Drive was in jeopardy. “We were advised by an attorney that the only way we could save our house was to file for this bankruptcy,” Tina confirmed. “We had gotten behind in our house notes.”
Beyoncé and Solange loved the home on Parkwood, as did Mathew. As much as Tina was attached to it, she was more practical about it than was her husband. She felt it could be sold and everyone would just have to adjust to new surroundings and move on. However, Mathew—maybe out of pride or maybe because he just didn’t want to uproot the family—wished to hang on to the property for as long as possible. Thus the bankruptcy filing of 1993.
The problem was that after the Knowleses restructured their debt with their bankruptcy filing of 1993, they were still unable to make the payments they’d agreed to with their creditors. Thus the 1993 bankruptcy was dismissed. Tina explained that this occurred because one of her employees, who paid the bills, had neglected to do so for a couple of months, “and so we did then have to reinstate the bankruptcy in January 1994, but it wasn’t because we were destitute. It was at the lawyer’s advice having to do with taxes and reorganizing everything.” All of this financial stress must have put even more pressure on Mathew and Tina’s marriage.
A proud man, Mathew never wanted Tina or anyone else to think that he couldn’t take care of his family. Of course, he had always been a hard worker—he’d had jobs since he was a teenager—so obviously it wasn’t that he didn’t want to work. If anything, his work had always been his life. It was just that now he wanted to work on one thing and one thing only: Beyoncé’s career. Helping to realize his daughter’s dreams gave him a real sense of purpose in life. “You have to believe in something,” he used to say, “and this is what I believe in. I believe in my daughters, not just Beyoncé but Solange and Kelly, too.”
Beyoncé, Solange, and Kelly seemed, at least from outward appearances, to be blissfully unaware of Mathew and Tina’s financial struggles. Of course, there was no reason for the girls to know anything about any of it at their age—Beyoncé and Kelly were both twelve, and Solange was seven. When they were little girls, Tina would dress them in the cutest little outfits she could make by hand, curl their hair, and spend a lot of time making them feel beautiful and giving them a sense of self-worth, even reminding them of her mother’s old adage, “Pretty is as pretty does.” She’d shield Beyoncé and Solange from trouble and dote on them as would any good mother, and she treated Kelly the same way. Even though the Knowleses had so many money issues, they still made sure that Kelly was taken care of and treated as if she were their biological daughter.
The girls were Tina’s life. In some ways, it was as
if she had created a whole new and safe world around them, one that didn’t necessarily include Mathew. It could be said that both Mathew and Tina had absorbed themselves into the girls’ lives—especially Beyoncé’s—the way troubled couples do when they find that the only thing they have in common are the children.
Though Tina felt there should be certain practical limitations as to how much money they should devote to Beyoncé’s aspirations, even she would have to admit that they almost always exceeded what would have been a reasonable amount of time and money to spend on any dream. “Whether there was money available or not, it was spent on the girls,” Tina would later testify, referring to the singing group. “That was the problem, I guess. If my utility bill was $2,000 because I had six girls over all the time, and my grocery bill was high because I was feeding them every day of the week, I’m not going to complain about it. That was the choice I made. I’m just going to make it work. So we made it work. We had to make it work for the girls and for our family.”
Dissension in the Ranks
After Girls Tyme’s Star Search defeat was broadcast in February 1993, Andretta and Mathew decided to change the group’s name in an effort to distance the group from the loss. After much deliberation, Girls Tyme became Somethin’ Fresh.
At around this time, a producer named Daryl Simmons—CEO of his own Silent Partner Productions—had begun to express interest in the group. Simmons had been in very successful business with L.A. Reid and Babyface, two important and talented producers who headed up their own production company, called LaFace. They’d had a great deal of success with artists such as Toni Braxton and TLC. Silent Partner Productions was Simmons’s new solo endeavor—the name being a nod to the fact that many people in the industry viewed him as a “silent partner” of the much more highly visible L.A. Reid and Babyface—and he was vigorously scouting for new talent to produce.
Becoming Beyoncé Page 14
