Becoming Beyoncé

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  “I was working on [R&B artist] Monica’s first album and I got a call from someone who had seen Somethin’ Fresh performing in Houston,” Daryl Simmons recalled. “ ‘Hey, these girls are really good down here,’ I was told. ‘You should come and check them out.’ I said, ‘Fine, but have them send me a tape first.’ A few days later, I got a VHS tape in the mail from Mathew Knowles. When I viewed it, I thought, ‘Wow, this group is pretty good.’ I decided to take a flight from Atlanta to Houston [on April 23, 1993] to see them. After we met in the lobby of my hotel, the girls came up to my room. Once there, they sang the Michael Jackson song ‘I Wanna to Be Where You Are’ and their own song, ‘Sunshine.’ I fell in love with them right away, especially with Beyoncé. This little kid got all up in my face and sang so hard and had all of these neck movements and facial expressions, I was like, ‘This girl is crazy good!’ So I asked them if they wanted to come down to Atlanta to work with me. They knew about TLC, they knew about Toni Braxton . . . so, yeah, they were excited about my invitation.”

  The girls also knew the drill by now: They would sign with Daryl’s production company, Silent Partner, and record songs under its auspices. Then, using those recordings as bait, Simmons would attempt to secure a record deal for them—just as Frager and Jackson had attempted to do before him. Hopefully, Simmons would be more successful. Lonnie Jackson would remain in the picture working behind the scenes with the girls, still as one of Andretta’s trusted advisers.

  The deal with Silent Partner Productions was signed and executed on June 11, 1993. However, as often happens in the record business, once the agreement was finalized, Somethin’ Fresh had to wait until songs were selected for them to record. In the meantime, a problem came to light when Pamela Luckett—mother of new member LeToya—wanted her daughter to be free to consider other opportunities, such as acting. She asked that LeToya continue to work with her theatrical agent, especially if she wasn’t going to be singing lead. Pamela also said she wasn’t happy with the management contract LeToya presently had in place with Mathew and Andretta. She wanted her attorney to once again review it.

  Though Pamela was immediately viewed as a troublemaker, she was really yet another strong, forthright woman in Mathew’s midst willing to go up against him if necessary. Maybe making things all the more annoying for Mathew was that she had a background in accounting. So she was definitely one to question finances.

  Beyoncé liked LeToya. However, since she didn’t know her very well, she had little patience for her or for her mother. One thing was certain: She believed that now was not the time for quibbling. She may have been only eleven—about to turn twelve in September—but she still believed that any dissension among the girls could prove detrimental to their future with Silent Partner Productions. The question immediately on her mind was: How is this going to affect the new deal?

  Those who knew her at the time believe that to Beyoncé, the singing group had always been serious business. She’d learned when Ashley Davis left the group that the act was nothing more than a means to an end, a vehicle for all of them to make their dreams come true and to be successful in show business. It seemed that she now understood that the girls in the group were business partners, not just friends.

  She called a group meeting to discuss the problem that had been presented by Pamela and LeToya. “Are we really going to just sit here and let everything we’ve worked for disappear just because of LeToya and her momma?” she asked Kelly and LaTavia, this according to her later testimony. The two girls didn’t even know how to answer the question. Yes? No? Maybe? They were eleven, what did they know? They certainly didn’t have Beyoncé’s innate judgment about these things, or her uncanny understanding of them. They were just little kids singing in a girls’ group.

  Fine. If her friends couldn’t make the decision, Beyoncé would be the one to do so: LeToya had to go, and immediately, “before we start recording, so we don’t have to go back and put the new girl on all the records.” One can’t help but marvel at her prescience. It’s as if she was born to be a career strategist, as if the idea of “branding” was second nature to her—and that nothing was going to get in her way on the road to stardom.

  After the meeting, Beyoncé told Mathew that LeToya should be released. Fully ready to cut ties with anyone who didn’t fall in line with group policies, she had Mathew’s full support. He asked Beyoncé if she would sign a letter expelling LeToya. She said she would, and not only that, but she would make sure that the other girls did so as well. Mathew wasted no time. On October 4, 1993, he sent off a letter to LeToya’s attorney, Warren Fitzgerald, informing him that he and Andretta had decided to terminate their agreement with LeToya. Fitzgerald returned with a letter saying that LeToya had a contract, and that he believed it to be enforceable. “It’s not enforceable if the girls want her out,” Mathew wrote in a quick note back to the attorney. “What are you going to do, Warren? Force a bunch of eleven-year-olds to sing together if they don’t want to? Beyoncé says the girls want LeToya out!”

  In a subsequent letter, Mathew reminded the lawyer that he and Andretta had been down a bad road previously, with Ashley Davis acting independently of the group’s interests, and that they didn’t intend to make the same mistake with her replacement, LeToya. Moreover, he mentioned that he and Andretta had gone out of pocket for $7,000 for vocal lessons, and that much of that money was spent on LeToya “because of her vocal ability in relation to the other members of the group and her lack of concentration and confidence.” He added that he would also not allow the Lucketts to renegotiate the management contract. “Next will they want to renegotiate their contract with Daryl Simmons?” he asked. He closed by saying that “at this time the decision of Andretta Tellman [sic] and Mathew Knowles is to terminate our agreement with LeToya Luckett and recommend to the members of Somethin’ Fresh and Daryl Simmons of Silent Partner Productions a suitable replacement.”

  This was hardball. It didn’t take long for Pamela Luckett to see it that way too. Very reluctantly, she backed down, and her daughter, LeToya, remained in the group.

  Lyndall

  In the late winter of 1993, when Beyoncé Knowles was twelve, she met a boy who would go on to become an important fixture in her life for almost the next ten years. Lyndall Locke was about to turn fourteen when he began attending the nondenominational Abundant Life Center (also known as the Abundant Life Cathedral) in Houston. Kelly Rowland, who was twelve, was a member of the church’s youth congregation. Lyndall Locke recalled, “One day Kelly brought a friend with her, this beautiful girl with dookie braids [large braids that were very popular in the early 1990s, often mistaken for dreadlocks]. She was wearing red-and-black Air Jordan basketball shoes—we used to call them ‘jays’—with starched black slacks with a nice sharp crease on both legs. And she had on a bright red blouse. She was so cute, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Finally, Kelly introduced us. I said, ‘Hi, I’m Lyndall.’ She extended her hand and said, ‘Hi, Lyndall. I’m Beyoncé. And I don’t remember anything after that—I think I blacked out,’ he recalled with a laugh.

  “Later that night, I called Kelly to get Beyoncé’s number,” he continued. “A girl answered who I thought was Kelly, and I said, ‘I know this may sound weird, but I’m hoping you can give me Beyoncé’s phone number. She’s so cute.’ And the voice on the other end said, “This is Beyoncé.’ Busted! How was I supposed to know they lived together? So, Beyoncé and I talked for hours that night, just kid stuff. ‘I like you’ and ‘I like you too.’ We talked about school. She told me she had this rabbit that she was totally obsessed with; when she said she was cuddling with it as she was talking to me, I remember feeling jealous of that damn rabbit! So, yeah, I guess you could say I fell hard right away, or as hard as a fourteen-year-old can fall, anyway. I hung up and thought, ‘Okay, she’s my girlfriend. Done!’ ”

  Young Lyndall Eugene Locke’s charisma and sense of humor were evident to all. He was a real charmer with a bright smile, dark dancing
eyes, and a cocoa-colored complexion. The second child born to Lydia and Stephen Michael Locke on December 3, 1979, he has an older sister, Laura. Stephen and Lydia split up when Lyndall was three.

  “I was raised by a single mother,” Lyndall recalled. “As a kid, I didn’t really have a relationship with my father. My mom worked two or three jobs to support us—whatever she had to do, she did. She always made it seem easy. Every now and then I would hear her crying in her bedroom, so I know it was tough on her. I think the reason I was this upbeat, positive kid was because I wanted to see my mom smile. I also think that’s why Beyoncé gravitated to me. I saw right away that she was all about work, a very serious girl who needed someone in her life she could clown with. Someone who was light and easy. I think I was just what the doctor ordered.”

  At the time, Beyoncé was attending Welch Middle School, which was in Lyndall’s neighborhood. Lyndall was in high school unusually for his age. However, he had started kindergarten a year earlier than most children, and because he was an honors student, was promoted an extra grade. “I would jump on my bike as soon as I got home from school and race over to Beyoncé’s school,” he recalled. “Then I’d wait until school let out, and there she’d be waiting for me with that knockout smile. We’d just stand there making eyes at one another and wait for her mother to pick her up.

  “The first time I saw Tina was when she pulled up driving a drop-top [convertible] red car,” Lyndall recalled. “She had Solange in the car. This vehicle was beautiful. I was, like, ‘Whoa, Beyoncé! What’s goin’ on in your family?’

  “Tina was gorgeous. She pulled up to the curb and hollered out, ‘Come on, now, Beyoncé. Get in the car. We’re late.’ I walked over to the car with Beyoncé and introduced myself to Tina. ‘Hi! I’m Lyndall.’ Tina said, ‘Yes, I’ve heard all about you. Now come on, Beyoncé, get in the car. We’re late!’ And off they went in their luxury drop-top with Beyoncé waving goodbye to me, her braids blowing in the breeze. I thought to myself, ‘Now that’s a family that’s successful, that’s a family that has money . . . that’s a family that’s going places.’ ”

  In Atlanta: The Dolls

  Beyoncé didn’t have much of a chance to get to know Lyndall Locke before she found herself in Atlanta rehearsing with Kelly, LaTavia, LeToya, Nicki, and Nina for an important event. Daryl Simmons had decided that the best way to interest record company executives in the group was to feature them in a showcase. Therefore, a performance would be held in the spring of 1994 at a famous rehearsal facility in Atlanta called Crossover Entertainment.

  One afternoon, the girls were at Daryl’s home in Atlanta, upstairs in one of the bedrooms being fitted into the new wardrobe he had purchased for them—black sequined tank tops and short studded jeans—when they heard the doorbell ring. “Girls, there’s someone at the front door for you,” hollered out Daryl. “Who would want to see us?” Beyoncé asked. “We’re never gonna find out up here,” LaTavia answered.

  Then, as young girls often do, they all burst into squeals and shrieks as they bounded down the staircase and to the front door, falling all over one another. “Every day there was some new unexpected girlish thrill,” Nina Taylor would later recall. “You just never knew what was going to happen.”

  Beyoncé was the first to the door. She swung it open and found a young, cute sixteen-year-old black kid standing before her, wearing an expensive leather jacket with large sunglasses. “Who the heck are you?” she asked. The youngster took in the six pretty girls in front of him, scrunched up his face, and said, “Now that’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout!” At that very moment, a full-figured African-American woman emerged from behind him and smacked him on the back of his head. “Boy!” she exclaimed. “What did I tell you, Usher? Behave, now!”

  Fourteen years later, in 2008, Beyoncé would duet with Usher on the song “Love In This Club Part II” for his album Here I Stand. By that time both would be major, award-winning recording stars. Back in 1994, though, they couldn’t have imagined the kind of success awaiting them. In the spring of that year, Usher Raymond III was the latest acquisition of LaFace Records. He had in common with Somethin’ Fresh that he too had competed on Star Search. Unlike the girls, though, he had won. He was spotted on the program by an A&R person of LaFace, who recommended that L.A. Reid audition him. Reid signed the youngster to a deal. His first self-titled LaFace album—produced by Sean “P. Diddy” Combs—was about to be released in a few months. This kid was about to break big, but for now he was just a troublemaking sixteen-year-old flirt hanging out at Daryl Simmons’s home.

  “From that day on, Usher was always somewhere around us,” recalled Nina Taylor. “My God! All of us had a crush on him. He was so cute, and what a little devil!”

  The girls would go on long walks with Usher, the six of them dutifully following him around as if he were a teenage Pied Piper. “He’d show us Atlanta by foot since none of us were driving yet,” Nicki Taylor recalled. “It was as if he could do the entire city by foot. At the end of the day, we’d be just so exhausted. But that boy, he had energy to spare. One night he had his heart set on playing Truth or Dare.”

  “Miss Tina was having a meeting with Daryl in one of the rooms on the ground level of the house,” Nina remembered. “Meanwhile, Usher took us down a flight of stairs to the basement level where, at the end of the stairs, was the media room where you could watch movies or listen to music. It was to be Truth or Dare with one boy and six girls, so you know where this was headed. He dared my sister, Nicki, to kiss him on one cheek. Then LaTavia had to kiss him on the other.” Things got so noisy they feared Tina would be checking in on them.

  “Quick, put this movie in the video player,” Usher suggested. He handed Beyoncé a cassette. It was the psychological thriller The Crying Game. Beyoncé took a look at the box and read the tagline aloud: “Some secrets should never be revealed.” She shook her head and said, “This is just gonna make things worse!” Still, she popped the movie into the player as the girls quickly arranged themselves at a safe distance from Usher. They began watching the movie, acting as if they were completely absorbed in it. Seconds later, Tina burst into the room. “What is going on down here?” she demanded to know.

  “Nothin’, Mama,” Beyoncé said innocently. “We’re just watching a movie, that’s all.”

  Tina looked around at all of the guilty faces in the room and said, “Y’all better behave down here, that’s all I have to say.” She then marched back upstairs.

  “We all flopped on the floor, dying with laughter,” Nina said. “Then Usher said, ‘I better stop this movie, because there’s a part coming up that you girls do not want to see.’ And he popped the tape out of the box.”

  The girls couldn’t spend as much time flirting with Usher as they might have liked, because the rehearsal schedule for the showcase was a grueling one. “Twelve-hour days,” LaTavia Roberson recalled, “sometimes more. It was a matter of taking each song and going over every little part of it again and again—harmonies, dancing, stage patter. When Mathew came down to Atlanta, that amped things up, for sure. He was really on us, but a lot was riding on this thing.”

  At one point during a particularly tough day, Beyoncé walked to a corner to be alone and, once there, burst into tears. The other girls gathered around her, wondering what was wrong. The stress of trying to be perfect building with each passing day finally took its release with her tears. “It’s not that I’m not happy,” she said. “I don’t even know what’s wrong,” she said. She was too young to identify that she was simply exhausted. “Ladies, we have to get back to work,” Mathew said as he approached the huddle. “But Beyoncé’s all upset,” Nicki told him. Mathew came closer and examined his daughter, who clearly was out of sorts. He asked the others to give him a moment with her. Father and daughter then spent a few minutes talking to each other, Mathew kneeling before her with his hand on Beyoncé’s slim shoulder. Finally, when it seemed as if she’d been boosted and was ready to get back to work, h
e led her by the hand back to the stage. “Okay, no more breaks,” he told the girls. “When you’re stars, there’s not gonna be time for tears. There’s only gonna be time for work.”

  “By this time—spring of 1994—Sha Sha Daniels and I were dating,” recalled Andretta Tillman’s nephew Belfrey Brown. “Ann came to me and told me that the girls needed money for the Atlanta gig, that there were certain expenses she was responsible for. She asked me for a few thousand dollars. I was nervous about giving it to her because of the way I was making my living at the time. I was selling drugs. Andretta didn’t approve, but she also didn’t want to ask Mathew for help, not that he would have had the money anyway,” Brown recalled. “So I gave her the money and she used it for miscellaneous expenses.

  “Actually, I had gotten used to bailing them all out,” he recalled. “Once, Tina, Mathew, and Andretta went to the West Coast with the girls, I think it was for an audition at Motown. When they got to Los Angeles, they were asked to stay a few days longer, but didn’t have the money to do so. Ann called me, panicked. ‘How much do y’all need?’ I asked her. And I heard Tina in the background holler out, ‘Tell him to send us $750. More, if he has it. We’re in big trouble out here.’ So Sha Sha and I went down to the Western Union the next morning and I wired them $750. If I could help out, I definitely wanted to do that for them.” There is no suggestion Tina or Mathew knew where Belfrey’s money had come from.

  The girls got along well with Belfrey, always knowing he was there to help in a pinch. He was in the inner circle, which meant he was as vulnerable to childhood pranking as anyone else trusted by the adults to watch over the kids. For example, one day, Belfrey took four of the girls—Beyoncé, Kelly, LaTavia, LeToya—as well as the Tillman boys—Armon and Chris—to the Greenspoint Mall in Houston. Once there, the six youngsters ran off to the arcade while he roamed the mall on his own. Eventually, he struck up a conversation with a pretty young woman. The two then went to the food court to get to know one another. “As we sat at a table, I started flirting with this girl, trying all of my best moves,” Belfrey recalled, “when all of a sudden, the kids came out of nowhere talking about, ‘Daddy! What are you doin’ with that girl?’ And Beyoncé said, ‘We’re sick and tired of you doing this every time we go out, Daddy! We’re gonna tell Mama on you. Always picking up ladies in the mall! Ooooh, you’re gonna be in so much trouble with Mama!’ The girl I was trying to score with stood right up and said, ‘You told me you were single and didn’t have any kids! What a liar!’ And she stormed right out of there. Beyoncé started laughing her fool head off, and then everyone else joined in. So, yeah, we always managed to have fun, even if there was this dark cloud hanging over our heads because of my aunt’s terrible illness.”