Becoming Beyoncé

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  The six girls were quiet for a long moment. Kelly was the first to speak. “But Miss Ann,” she said, “this is our group. They can’t break us up, can they?” Beyoncé answered for Andretta. “They can do whatever they want,” she said. “That’s the way it works, Kelly,” she added. She knew the drill by now, how the game was played.

  “Beyoncé is right,” Andretta said. “As much as I love you girls, there’s not much I can do about this.”

  True to her nature, Andretta was against the idea of dropping any of the girls from the act. She’d already warned Cholotte, Nicki and Nina’s mother, that her daughters were on the chopping block. She said that Mathew hadn’t even wanted the sisters to be a part of the “Star Search” performance, but that she had insisted upon it. Now, she felt there was nothing more she could do. “It’s bigger than Mathew,” she said, “now, it’s the label’s call, though I think Mathew instigated it.”

  “Oh my God,” Kelly exclaimed. “This ain’t fair, Miss Ann.”

  Beyoncé didn’t comment, but one might imagine that she was likely thinking, “Dang, Kelly! Get with it!”

  Andretta stood up on shaky legs. “Show business is a lot of things,” she said as she walked out of the room, “but fair isn’t one of them.”

  “We were in shock,” Nicki Taylor recalled, “but still, we knew that one of us was still going to be in the group. We just didn’t know which one. LaTavia wasn’t really a singer, she was a rapper. Nicki and I weren’t singers either, we were dancers. The fact that we had to compete against one another as singers for that coveted fourth spot was upsetting since we were also cousins. But it was what it was.

  “For the next week, Nicki, LaTavia, and I worked with a vocal coach day and night,” added Nina Taylor. “Then, finally, we each auditioned for Mathew and Andretta and the vocal teacher. My mother later told me that the coach fought hard for me. Though he thought I had the most range, Mathew and Andretta really wanted LaTavia. Mathew had been against me and Nicki for a while, though. Anyway, since it was two against one, LaTavia got the one remaining spot in the group.”

  “I was elated,” LaTavia Roberson said, “but the fact that my cousins were on their way out, well . . . that was devastating after all the work they put into the group.”

  Of course, Nina and Nicki had been with the act from the very beginning, having been recruited by Deborah Laday and Denise Seals in 1990. Therefore, this really was a bitter pill to swallow. “When we got over our disappointment, we were happy for the other girls,” Nina Taylor recalled. “We figured we’d all still be friends, you know? Sisters. Miss Ann even said, ‘You never know, we’ll probably need dancers at some point anyway. Rather than hire girls, we’ll just use you two.’ So we didn’t feel like we were out, necessarily. We felt, at the very least, we would all still be friends. But . . . it didn’t work out quite that way.”

  In fact, the night Nicki and Nina left the meeting at Andretta’s home—the one where it was announced that LaTavia had been chosen for the group—would pretty much mark the end of their friendship with Beyoncé, Kelly, and LeToya. It would also put at least a temporary crimp in their relationship with their cousin, LaTavia. “We called every day,” Nina recalled. “We left so many messages, we lost track. ‘Why aren’t y’all calling us back?’ Nothing. We kept going over to the house and they weren’t there. It was like they had vanished. Finally, Miss Ann told us they had gone down to Atlanta to begin recording for Elektra. But without even saying goodbye? I was twelve. Nicki was fifteen. Can you imagine how we took this? After being with those girls every day for five years, day and night? We had just performed as a group for our Taylor family reunion in Louisiana, so the girls were a real part of our family as far as we were concerned.”

  “I just remember sitting in my room crying,” Nicki Taylor recalled, “and one night, I got out a pen and paper and wrote Beyoncé a letter, something along the lines of, ‘If y’all could just see the tears running down my face.’ And since I actually was crying when I wrote it, one of my tears fell on the paper and made a wet spot. I wrote, ‘Here’s where it’s wet because of my tears.’ I was just a little girl, very dramatic and heartbroken. The letter got to Beyoncé. I know because Mathew called my mom.” According to Nicki, Mathew expressed unhappiness that the letter had made Beyoncé cry.

  If Beyoncé actually did cry upon receiving Nicki’s letter, maybe it touched something deep within her, that part of her that was still just a child. One thing it apparently didn’t do, though, was make her respond. But who knows? Maybe Mathew wouldn’t allow it, feeling it would only upset his daughter further.

  After that phone call from Mathew, Cholotte Taylor says she sat her daughters down and told them, “You need to stop. If it’s for you, it’s for you. But if not, God has another plan.” She recalled, “I figured God wanted them to go to school and get their degrees, and that maybe that’s what this was really all about. So I started pushing them in that direction. The way I raised them, they always knew they were going to do something great with their lives, singing group or not. But, oh my! They sure did miss their friends.

  “None of the mothers called me, either. It felt like, ‘Okay, that’s it. See you no more.’ When Ashley left, at least that was her mother’s choice. But this was not my choice. My daughters were just dropped.”

  Mathew would no doubt have sat down with Beyoncé, Kelly, LaTavia, and LeToya and told them to focus on the job at hand and not to worry about their former group members. They couldn’t afford to let anything stop this fast-moving train, not after all they’d been through. There was no time for tears. It was pretty much the same thing the girls—including Nina and Nicki—were told when Ashley Davis left the group. “It happened to her, and now it happened to us,” Nina Taylor observed.

  In the years to come, Nina and Nicki Taylor would leave show business, go on to college, and became schoolteachers. They would marry, have children, and live happy, contented lives. In a strange and sad coincidence, Nina would also suffer from lupus, the same disease Andretta battled. Nina went under the care of Andretta’s doctor; she is presently in remission.

  “The fact that, to this day, none of us talk to Beyoncé still bothers us,” said Nina Taylor, also speaking for her sister. “For years, I kept thinking, was it really a sisterhood? Or was it just business? Because if it was just business, then I should have conducted myself in a different way. But as a little girl, you give your heart. You don’t know any better. You give everything you have, everything you are, and you just never think you’ll get hurt. Until one day . . . you do.”

  First Date

  The Dolls—now just Beyoncé, Kelly, LaTavia, and LeToya—spent most of 1994 in Atlanta recording. Since all were just fourteen, they were chaperoned by LaTavia’s mom, Cheryl, as well as by one of Daryl Simmons’s assistants. Simmons also arranged for them to have home tutors so that they could remain on top of their studies. While the girls certainly missed their family members in Houston, they felt that their dreams were coming true in Atlanta and that it was well worth the sacrifice. Kelly would use her time there to reconnect with her mother, Doris.

  At the end of 1994, Beyoncé Knowles returned home for the holidays, which also gave her the opportunity to see Lyndall Locke again after more than a year of long-distance “dating”—which meant plenty of telephone conversations. By now, Tina and Mathew felt they should get to know Lyndall better. “I finally had a chance to meet the parents,” he recalls. “I went to the house for dinner. That’s when I got to know Tina and Big Mac, which is what I started calling Mathew.

  “Let me tell you, Big Mac don’t play,” recalled Lyndall. “I was scared as shit meeting him. Of course, he gave me the third degree: ‘What are you about?’ ‘What kind of student are you?’ ‘Who are your parents?’ But we liked each other right away. He was very protective of his daughter, and since I didn’t have a father at home, I was intrigued by their close relationship. To see a dad be so involved in his kid’s life was very interesti
ng to me. Tina? Beautiful. I’d never met a woman that elegant before; she made a huge impression on me. She was someone who got right to the point, was very direct—no bullshit from Tina Knowles. She was a straight shooter.”

  Once Lyndall came into her life, Beyoncé wanted to spend as much time as possible with him—except when she was rehearsing or recording, which (as he was beginning to understand) was always to be a priority. When they were together, his sense of humor was something she came to really appreciate. There was simply no way to be in a room with him for more than five minutes without laughing. Because she was always so serious, Lyndall was a great distraction. Plus, he was sincere. He had a good heart, and she could sense it.

  Especially where Lyndall was concerned, Beyoncé kept her career very much apart from her personal life. Lyndall recalled, “I didn’t even know she was a singer! Someone mentioned it to me and I asked her about it, and she was vague and said something about playing the piano. [“I played piano for like a second but then stopped,” Beyoncé explained in 2015. She does still play, though, as she does on her 2015 video, “Die With You.”] We talked on the phone almost every night while she was in Atlanta and she never mentioned problems with LaTavia, Nina, Nicki . . . or whoever. I would really have to pull it out of her if she was having an issue in the group. She had her girls to talk to about that type of thing. With me, we had a whole other life.”

  One night, after bringing Beyoncé to Lyndall’s home for a Friday night TV date, Tina had a conversation with Lyndall’s mother, Lydia, while sitting in the Lockes’ dining room. Over a cup of piping hot coffee, Tina talked about her daughter. “Tina said she found it amazing that for such a small child, Beyoncé had so much focus,” Lydia recalled. “I told her that I wished Lyndall had some of that kind of focus. He was all over the map, that one! She liked Lyndall’s energy, though. In fact, she said she wanted Beyoncé to have a little more fun. She sometimes found herself worried by how hard she drove on herself. ‘I want her to have a more normal childhood,’ she said. ‘She has the advantage of youth, and when that’s gone, you can’t get it back. But,’ she concluded, ‘something tells me that boat has already sailed.’ ”

  Childhood sweethearts Beyoncé and Lyndall didn’t share their first kiss until they’d been together for a little more than a year and a half, in December 1994. Lyndall had just turned fifteen. Beyoncé was thirteen. The occasion was a concert by the R&B artist Brian McKnight, whose platinum-selling eponymous debut album had been released two years earlier. It was the first concert Lyndall had ever attended; Beyoncé saw her first concert when she was just six years old, Michael Jackson at the Summit in Houston, back in April 1988. Lyndall’s mother, Lydia—who paid a couple hundred dollars for good seats for the McKnight show—had agreed to take the youngsters to the concert venue, the Arena Theatre in Houston.

  “I was to chauffeur them to the show, and Tina was to pick them up after,” Lydia Locke recalled. “This was really their first big date. I told Lyndall, ‘Boy, you need to dress up for this big night.’ So he put on a suit with a crisp white shirt, a nice tie—the whole nine yards. Then, when we got to Beyoncé’s, she was dressed very casually in a little maroon pantsuit. I thought, ‘Oh no. I clearly must have misread this thing.’ Lyndall looked at me as if to say, ‘Mom! I’m overdressed and it’s your fault!’ Tina got out her camera and had the kids pose for pictures. “We must have taken a hundred photos,” said Lydia Locke. “We were so proud and excited. Beyoncé was just as sweet as she could be, a little southern belle. She and Lyndall were the cutest couple.”

  “Once we got to the auditorium, before the show started, I accidentally dropped our popcorn,” Lyndall recalled. “Beyoncé and I both bent down to get it. When we did, our heads bumped. We looked at each other, and that’s when it happened—the first kiss. I had never before felt anything like that in my entire . . . fifteen years,” he recalled. “I’d been waiting for that kiss for a year! It was one of the most awesome kisses ever, and if she tells you any different, she’d be totally lying,” he concluded, laughing.

  Disappointment

  At the beginning, my relationship with Mathew Knowles was cool,” Daryl Simmons recalled. “My impression of him—and I still think it’s an accurate one—is that he was hardworking, passionate, and determined. He respected me and I respected him. It was all good. Until one day . . . it wasn’t.”

  Daryl had always believed it beneficial to hold what he called “morale meetings” with his recording artists. Not only did he view them as a good way for his acts to express any concerns or problems they may have had, but he also looked at the meetings as an opportunity to boost their spirits. His first “morale meeting” with the Dolls in Atlanta went well. Gathering them after a recording session, he said, “Girls, you know what? Everyone thinks that as soon as you have a record deal, you’re going to have an album right away. But there’s a process. And it’s usually ‘hurry up and wait.’ ”

  “What’s that mean?” Beyoncé wanted to know.

  “It means we can rush our work and hand over the music to Elektra only to then have them sit on it and wait until they’re good and ready to release it.” With that being the case, he concluded, the best thing they could do was to just take their time and do the best job possible.

  “That makes sense,” Kelly said, nodding. The girls all agreed.

  Beyoncé then wanted to know what would happen if the label didn’t like the music once it was finished. Would it then drop the artist? Daryl said yes, under those circumstances the artist would likely be cut from the roster. When she said that this didn’t seem fair, Daryl quipped, “Welcome to the record industry.”

  The producer and his charges then talked for another thirty minutes about the music business, the girls soaking up every bit of knowledge they could from him. The meeting ended with a group hug. Subsequent morale meetings went just as well. Somehow, though, Mathew, back in Houston, found out about Daryl’s meetings with the girls, which was fine since they weren’t meant to be kept secret. According to Daryl, Mathew was upset. He telephoned Simmons and let him have it. “Listen, don’t you ever have meetings with my girls without me being there,” he said, according to Simmons’s memory. “Do you hear me? That is not cool, brother. That is not cool at all.”

  “Whoa, Mat!” Daryl exclaimed. “It’s no big deal. It’s just me keeping the girls’ morale up.”

  Mathew said he was making plans to go to Atlanta immediately to discuss the matter in person. He drove seven hours from Houston and, by the time he got to his destination, was angrier than ever. “And he went off,” Daryl recalled. “I mean, he went off! ‘These are my girls,’ he shouted at me. ‘Don’t you ever have no meeting without me being present.’ I told him I was responsible for making their record, and in that capacity, of course I could have meetings with them. ‘We’re not talking business,’ I said. ‘These are just morale meetings!’ Mathew wasn’t having it, though. ‘I handle their morale, not you,’ he told me. ‘This is my damn group, not yours!’ ”

  Later that day, Mathew apparently told Tina what had happened with Daryl. Privately, Mathew’s position was that he knew and understood Daryl as a producer and respected his views about the recording of music. However, he had no idea what his views were in regard to the record industry in general or, really, about anything else. His girls were of an impressionable age, and he didn’t want Daryl or anyone else influencing them without his being able to first vet the process. It actually made sense. But there was probably a better way to handle the situation other than to just blow up about it. Mathew was never one to hold back, though; he could be passionate, blunt, and to the point, and that was just something people who did business with him had to understand. “At least with Mathew Knowles you always knew where you stood,” Daryl Simmons would say about him.

  Tina was unhappy about the way Mathew had handled things with Daryl. From the way Mathew described things it sounded to her like he had harmed the relationship. This was no time to cau
se trouble, not when the family was in so much financial turmoil. Soon Tina was on the telephone with Daryl, trying to smooth things over.

  “She told me she was so sorry that Mathew went off on me,” Daryl recalled. “ ‘Mat respects you, Daryl,’ she told me. ‘He admires what you’ve done with your career. In a lot of ways, he wants to be like you.’ I appreciated that but told her that the way I saw it, it just wasn’t going to work with me and Mathew. I told her that if he would go off on me for something as minor as group meetings, what can I expect down the road from him?”

  Tina finally hung up, but not before again apologizing profusely and expressing her hope that the two men might work things out.

  At the beginning of 1995, the songs for Elektra were finally finished. Over the years, some people have suggested that they weren’t of the quality that Sylvia Rhone at Elektra had hoped for when she signed the act. This is Mathew’s memory of the situation. But according to Daryl, Rhone also had issues with Mathew. “Once the music was done,” Simmons recalled, “true to the nature of the record industry, things didn’t move as quickly as everyone would have liked. That’s the way it goes. Hurry up and wait, just like I told the girls.

  “But then Mathew started calling the record company every day, pushing Sylvia, asking, ‘How come nothing’s going on?’ He was impatient. Of course, that was understandable. After all, he had put everything into this venture and he wanted it to work. But I think he was a little naïve when it came to dealing with people in the record business because, in my opinion anyway, you can’t push. People don’t respond well to that, especially if you have no track record of hits.”