Becoming Beyoncé

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Certainly Sylvia told Daryl she was finding the phone calls a bit much. Whatever the reason—lack of interest from the record industry or Mathew’s persistence—Elektra dropped a bombshell.

  “Long story short, Sylvia Rhone decided not to release the girls’ recordings,” Simmons concluded. “In other words, she canceled the deal with Elektra. Finished. Over. Done.”

  It was up to Mathew to tell the girls that Elektra had elected not to go forward with them. He gathered them in the living room of their Atlanta accommodations to deliver the sad news. He told them it was a tough business and that it had just gotten a little tougher for all of them. “Elektra has decided to drop us from the label.” The girls were confused. Did this mean their music wasn’t going to be coming out at all? Mathew confirmed as much. He explained it by saying the label wanted “to go in another direction.” That was all Beyoncé needed to hear to find some hope in the situation. “We can do that,” she said eagerly. “We can go in any direction they want. All they have to do is tell us what they want, and we can give it to them.”

  “No, Bey,” Mathew said sadly. “I’m afraid not. That door is closed.” (To date, these Elektra recordings have still never been heard by the public.)

  Making a bad situation in her life just a little worse was that at this same time, Beyoncé found out that Lyndall Locke—who was back in Houston—was having a sexual relationship with another girl. Lyndall, who was fifteen at the time, with his hormones raging, had lost his virginity to a girl from church. Maybe it wasn’t surprising that he would want to see other girls, with Beyoncé gone so much of the time. Lyndall couldn’t lie about what he’d done, and Beyoncé told him there was no way they would be together now.

  Whatever sadness or anger Beyoncé was feeling about Lyndall’s behavior would have to be pushed aside, at least for now while she was coming to terms with the loss of the record deal. When the girls said they wanted to talk to Daryl about it, Mathew decided to allow it. Beyoncé, LaTavia, Kelly, and LeToya then showed up at Daryl Simmons’s studio, all four clearly upset. “We feel like we let you down,” Beyoncé said.

  “Beyoncé, it’s not like that, at all,” Daryl told her. “It’s just that me and your dad are not gonna work out. He sees things going one way, and I see them going another way.”

  “But we’ve worked so hard,” Beyoncé said.

  “Look,” Daryl began, “don’t worry. You girls will get a record deal, I promise you. You deserve one and you will get signed.”

  “They were really a mess, all of them,” Simmons said, “and, man, I felt so terrible. These kids were so puzzled by the whole thing. It was just business. But try explaining that to a bunch of eager and also exhausted fourteen-year-old girls. I thought, Wow, for their whole lives, it must seem like adults have been screwing with them. All of the decisions made for them over the years have been made by grown-ups with a vested interest in the outcome, and they’ve just had to deal with it. They haven’t had much say in any of it. Looking at them before me, I could actually see the way it had worn them down.”

  Daryl was emotionally drained too. After the Dolls left his studio, he turned to his producer, Thom “TK” Kidd, and said, “Man! That was tough.” The two then sat and stared into space for a long time, trying to collect themselves. “God forbid those kids ever make any money,” Daryl finally said, breaking the silence. “Because, dude, if those kids ever make any money, it’s not going to go smoothly.”

  Financial and Marital Woes

  Though Mathew and Tina tried to shield Beyoncé, Solange, and Kelly from their ever-worsening financial situation, by the time the Elektra deal fell through the girls understood that serious trouble was in the offing. Everyone had been counting on Elektra to save the day, and now that it was obviously not going to happen, Mathew and Tina were out of options—especially since earlier, on March 30, 1995, another tax lien had been assessed against them for $38,845.30.

  Tina would soon be forced to give a deposition in a lawsuit relating to their finances during which attorney Benjamin Hall would produce checks written against her 1995 business account and that had been returned for “insufficient funds.” Not just one or two, either. He produced eleven of them and laid them out on the conference table before her, almost as if to mock her. It had to have been embarrassing. “Well, if someone gives you a bad check it causes your checks to bounce,” Tina explained, trying to keep her composure.

  “Assuming you don’t have an operating balance in excess of that amount of money,” the lawyer said, stating the obvious.

  “Assuming,” Tina snapped back.

  Andretta Tillman was also having more than her fair share of bad luck. Back in June 1994, she’d been forced to file for bankruptcy. “She had gone through all her money,” explained her brother To-to Brown. “She put all of it into the girls. We couldn’t believe it. All that money from the accident settlement and insurance—gone!”

  “I was there when her car was repossessed,” recalled Pat Felton. “I remember telling her that she shouldn’t spend money on new photos of the girls if she couldn’t pay her car note. ‘But we are so close,’ she would tell me, ‘I can feel success right around the corner.’ She had invested so much into this dream, I felt that maybe she could no longer see things practically. She was even selling off her furniture so that she could buy the girls new dresses.

  “I went with her to the bankruptcy court and saw all the paperwork, and pretty much all of it had to do with the singing group. After her house was foreclosed on, she, Armon, and Chris moved into a smaller one. But only those in her inner circle knew all of these details. She was pretty private.”

  While Andretta didn’t share her money challenges with the Knowleses, they didn’t share theirs with her either. Even though they were all in the same sort of trouble, it was as if they had too much pride to admit it to each other. Just three days after Andretta’s filing, Mathew and Tina refiled their own bankruptcy claim for a third time as they continued to sort out their debts.

  “Did Ann know you were having all of these problems?” Benjamin Hall would ask Tina.

  “She didn’t know our financial situation at all because we were steadily putting out money every single day,” Tina explained. “The girls continued to stay at our house and we continued to feed them every single day. The bankruptcy did not affect our ability to support them.”

  In the fall of 1995, Tina finally made the difficult decision to split up the family. It seemed there were still problems in her marriage. As much as she may have been concerned about appearances, Tina was also practical. There was no way to save the house, she decided. Thus the best strategy was to separate from Mathew, sell the house, and see what the future held. She knew what had to be done, and, as tough as she knew it would be on everyone, she decided to screw up all her courage and get on with it. She found a small town house for herself and the girls—Beyoncé, Solange, and Kelly. Wherever Mathew landed was up to him.

  Big Changes

  It was a fall day in 1995. Beyoncé and Kelly, fourteen, and Solange, nine, were sitting on the top of three brick steps at the end of a cement walkway in front of the family’s two-story home at 3346 Parkwood Drive. “Girls, you just can’t sit there,” Tina said as she approached them. “Come on, now, you have to move! Belfrey needs to get through here.”

  As if on cue, Belfrey Brown pulled up in a beat-up pickup truck with two close friends. “Thanks so much for coming,” Tina said as she approached the young men. “This won’t take long,” she said, her manner officious. “It’s just a bunch of boxes in the living room. Now, here’s the address to the town house,” she said, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a slip of paper. She handed it to Belfrey.

  “Is everything okay, Tina?” Belfrey asked.

  “Everything is just fine,” Tina answered brusquely. “I’m just doing what I always do, Belfrey. I am taking care of my family. Thank you for your help,” she said, kissing him quickly on the cheek.

  “She wa
s tense,” Belfrey recalled, “and I knew she was in pain, but she wasn’t going to show it, no way.” Tina had called Andretta very late the night before to ask if she knew anyone who could help her move out of the house she shared with Mathew. Andretta suggested her nephew, Belfrey. “Of course, we had all heard that Tina and Mat were splitting up,” he recalled. “We also heard a rumor that the house had been foreclosed on. [That was actually not the case; the house was being sold.] So, when Tina called and asked for help, I wasn’t surprised.”

  “What about all of your furniture?” asked Belfrey.

  “The furniture stays,” Tina said. “There’s plenty in the town house.”

  Belfrey and his friends entered the house to find stacked boxes on a wrought-iron-and-wood staircase in the entryway. As he looked around, the first thing that crossed his vision was a collection of what appeared to be expensive African art in the living room to his left. It was obvious that the house had been decorated during better times; the furnishings were exquisite.

  Most everyone knew that Tina would end up in a town house somewhere, but Mathew’s whereabouts would remain more of a mystery. “At first he stayed with my sister,” Andretta’s brother, To-to, recalled. “He didn’t have any place to go, and Andretta was the kind of person who, no matter how she felt about you, she wasn’t going to have you sleepin’ in the street. He stayed with her for a short time. Then I think he got an apartment.”

  This breakdown of the family weighed heavy on Tina’s mind and heart. She never imagined herself in a situation where she would be raising two children on her own—three, counting Kelly. With the marital bond she shared with Mathew now broken, her great concern was for the welfare of the girls. “ ‘I will never give up,’ she told me,” recalled one of her good friends at this time. “ ‘I will fight through the pain,’ she said, ‘and I will do it for Beyoncé. I will do it for Solange. And I will do it for Kelly.’ ”

  Since money was so tight, Tina worked harder than ever at Headliners. “My mama worked until she had calluses on her fingers and swollen feet,” Beyoncé said in 2011, “then she would find time to redecorate houses for her friends, and also make everyone’s prom and wedding dresses. She took me and Solange to our dance classes and recitals, cooked us delicious meals, and brought us to church. On Sunday, it was family day. She worked hard and never stopped.”

  “I have always said that Beyoncé got her work ethic not from her father,” observed Pat Felton, “but from her mother.”

  Still, despite Tina’s strong work ethic, there were times when she couldn’t make ends meet and was forced to put her pride aside. “Tina began calling Andretta more and more asking for money,” recalled Sha Sha Daniels. “This is when we knew things were desperate, because for Tina Knowles to ask for help? She had to really need it.

  “Beyoncé never talked to me about these problems,” Sha Sha recalled. “I think in some ways, she shut down. She became much more shy, much less open. She would frown a lot. ‘Girl, if you don’t turn that frown upside down, it’s gonna freeze like that,’ I would tell her. Solange was smaller, but somehow she seemed more in touch with her feelings. She would talk about things, but not Beyoncé.”

  “I was too young to realize what was going on,” Beyoncé would later remember. “It worried me, and I didn’t understand what happened until I got older. Back then, all I knew for sure was that my mom and I were moving from a big house to a small house, and we went from having two cars to one car.”

  In December 1995, the house the Knowleses had so loved at 3346 Parkwood Drive was sold for $165,000, “way less than what we could’ve gotten if we’d had time to sell it right,” Tina would conclude sadly.

  “We went from living in a four-bedroom house with this beautiful living space,” Solange Knowles recalled, “into a two-bedroom apartment . . .”

  “. . . and that’s when my mother told me she and my father had gotten a separation,” Beyoncé continued. “To make things worse, it was around Christmas, when families are supposed to be together. It was such a painful time that I erased a lot of those memories from my head. Basically, I didn’t know where my dad was, my mom was depressed, and we didn’t have much money. Kelly and I had to share a very small room, and my sister shared a room with my mom.”

  “This was a dark time for the girls, but especially for Beyoncé,” said one of her relatives. “The way she felt about her dad? Seeing him walk out the door like that was hard, and coming on top of losing Lyndall and then the record deal—it was too much.” This relative says that Beyoncé “spent a lot of time alone in her room,” which was par for the course for her. When upset and confused, she would almost always isolate herself. “When she got into a mood like that, it was hard to reach her,” said the source. “The sensitivity that made her such a budding artist could work against her when times got rough. She could become very, very depressed. When this happened, Tina knew to just leave her alone.”

  Despite this upset in their lives, or maybe because of it, Tina continued to hold fast to her religious convictions. She didn’t talk much about her spirituality, but it was a constant in her life. She made certain it was also a strong influence on the lives of her daughters and Kelly. One day during this time, when Beyoncé seemed particularly upset about what was going on, Tina sat her down with her and sang the old gospel hymn “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” She explained that it had been Dr. Martin Luther King’s favorite spiritual and that Mahalia Jackson’s version of it was the best-known and most respected. With her eyes closed and her hands facing her daughter, palms up in supplication, she then sang the hymn, almost as if in a trance, completely overtaken by the message. “Hold my hand, lest I fall,” she sang, “take my hand, precious Lord, lead me home.” It was a moment Beyoncé would never forget. “It was like she was a vessel,” she would recall in February 2015, “with God using her body to speak and to heal.” (In 2015, Beyoncé would perform a stirring, memorable rendition of this same song during the 57th Annual Grammy Awards presentation.)

  If anything, the soulful connection between Tina and her girls was all the more strengthened during this time that Mathew was gone from them. It was as if Tina, more than ever, became the family’s moral compass; Beyoncé depended on her for guidance, as she still does today. If there was a problem, they knew they had the tools to handle it within their own domain; there was no reason to share it with the world.

  “Beyoncé was Daddy’s little girl until Tina took the kids and moved into the town house,” added Kenny Moore. “Then, from that time on, as far as I could tell, she was Mommy’s little girl. It was ‘me and Mommy against the world.’ She became very protective of her mother, and also of Solange and Kelly. The women now presented a solid front. When they moved into the apartment, we started to see Beyoncé, in particular, become a whole lot less forthcoming about what was going on.”

  By the end of 1995, the family had been torn apart in large measure because of financial pressures. Of course, Mathew’s personal issues also had great bearing on what had happened to his family. Though he was working on those problems in therapy, their roots were deep, and who knew how long it would take for him to reconcile any of it? Where business was concerned, though, he had a fuller grasp of what needed to happen.

  According to what Tina would testify, “Mathew was becoming more and more disgruntled. He and I had conversations about Ann not being able to do her part because of her illness and financial situation. Mathew was contributing more to the group by this time. There were people who didn’t even know Ann was still involved! Mathew told Ann he wanted to restructure the deal again where he would now end up with more money because he really was doing more work. My concern was hurting Ann’s feelings. I remember, I was doing Ann’s hair, which I did all the time,” said Tina, “and we discussed it.”

  It was a day that also stood out to Bonnie Lee, who was one of Andretta’s oldest friends. Many years earlier, when Bonnie moved to Houston from Trinidad, she opened a daycare business, and Andr
etta’s boys, Chris and Armon, and infant daughter, Shawna, were the first children she looked after. She and Andretta had been good friends ever since.

  “There was going to be a function at Ann’s that night, and she wanted to get her hair done for it,” Bonnie recalled. “Tina was going straight to the party from her beauty shop. Ann and I arrived early and waited for Tina. Ann said Tina was a good soul, that she and Mathew had separated. ‘Tina is trying to keep it quiet,’ Ann told me, ‘so please don’t mention it.’ ”

  Ann also told Bonnie that she appreciated the fact that Tina went out of her way to make sure she felt good about herself despite her illness. Finally, Tina showed up looking regal in a full-length sable coat—in the middle of the day! The family may have been having money problems, but one would never know it by looking at Tina. “My goodness, it took my breath away, she was so beautiful,” Bonnie would recall. “How’s Kokie?” Tina asked Bonnie, referring to Bonnie’s daughter, who was the same age as Beyoncé. “Tell her to come over and hang out with Beyoncé and the girls. I sure would love for Beyoncé to have at least one friend who’s not trying to be the next Diana Ross,” she said, chuckling.

  As Tina cut and styled Andretta’s hair, the two women had a serious business conversation. According to what Tina would recall, she told Andretta how much she loved her and that even though “business is business,” as her friend she wanted to be sure that Andretta was amenable to a new arrangement that would give Mathew more money. Andretta said she felt badly that, physically, she couldn’t do more. Tina urged her to not feel that way, especially since she had already done so much.

  “Well, I’m not going to oppose anything that helps the girls,” Andretta finally said. “If Mathew wants more money, I guess I have to accept that.” It didn’t seem as if she really meant it, though. However, she was so weak and tired, she was clearly losing her fighting spirit.