Becoming Beyoncé

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  “In my family, I was always off with my friends doing stupid stuff like any other kid,” Lyndall Locke recalls. “My sister was always gone, my mother was always somewhere, busy. But there was no such thing going on at the Knowles household. For them it was, ‘Let’s go get some Popeyes fried chicken and come back and eat it and we’ll all watch TV together and maybe have a talent show or do some arts and crafts.’ We practically never left the house to hang out. But still, I loved going to the house on Braes Meadow because just being there was out of this world—you always felt that family love. Beyoncé had no friends outside of the house, other than the girls in her group,” he continued. “She would say she didn’t need friends. She had Mathew, Tina, Solange, Kelly, LaTavia, LeToya, Solange . . . and me. And that was about it.”

  One night, Mathew came home to Braes Meadow with Popeyes fried chicken for everyone and a bottle of champagne for him and Tina. He popped the cork, and as the young people ate their chicken, he and Tina toasted their newfound success. Tina remarked that she really couldn’t imagine how they had done it, though she was thankful to God that they had gotten through it. Mathew had to agree. The two clinked glasses and celebrated their hard-earned victory.

  This same year, Lyndall was excited to ask Beyoncé to be his date at his Lee High School senior prom. Tina encouraged her to go, feeling that it would take her mind off her lingering sadness about Andretta. When she was working, Beyoncé was fine because she was distracted. However, on her off time she was definitely still grieving. “It was as if she had a hole in her heart that she just wasn’t able to fill,” is how one person who knew her at this time put it.

  Beyoncé said yes to the prom and was glad she did. “It was the only prom I ever went to,” she would later say. “I didn’t know anybody but Lyndall. I didn’t have any classmates, because by this time I was being tutored and homeschooled, so I never had that experience. I guess I sort of lived it vicariously through my boyfriend.”

  “It was a great night,” Lyndall recalled. His mom had rented him a brand-new red Mustang convertible for the night to impress his date. The two dined at the classy Brownstone restaurant in Houston. “I pretty much had the most beautiful date at the prom,” Lyndall recalled.

  Beyoncé would in years to come re-create the concept of a prom date in her video for “Best Thing I Never Had,” during which her character is rejected at the dance. Of course, that never happened. “And the jerk playing me had a flattop, and I ain’t never had no flattop,” Lyndall laughed. “I was so much cooler than the guy playing me in the video!”

  Lyndall—No Direction?

  Just as there were two versions of the song released to the public, there were two videos for Destiny’s Child’s “No, No, No.” One was in a concert setting for the more sedate “Part 1,” and the other was in a nightclub for Wyclef’s more dance-oriented “Part 2.” What strikes the viewer about both is that the girls are uncommonly beautiful in them and seem mature beyond their ages, especially in the “Part 1” video.

  In the concert video, after the young ladies are introduced in a trendy lounge setting, they take the stage before a small audience and sing the song. Although they are in their midteens—Beyoncé and LaTavia were fifteen, LeToya and Kelly sixteen—they are definitely not going for a teenage image. Flawlessly applied heavy makeup makes them appear years older. Their pouty, dark red lips and bedroom eyes are showcased in suggestive close-ups. Their costumes are clingy and revealing. The undeniable goal is to project adult sensuality. As the girls perform for an intimate crowd, their suggestive moves might be viewed by some as inappropriate given that they are underage.

  “When I saw the first video for ‘No! No! No!’ I thought, ‘What the hell?’ ” recalled Daryl Simmons. “The biggest criticism of the girls when they were with me was that they were too adult, too sexy. But then I saw this video and they were way hotter and way sexier than they ever were with me. My friends in the business were asking me, ‘Man! Have you seen this girl, Beyoncé? Damn!’ When I would say, ‘Dude, she’s only, like, fifteen,’ they would be shocked. They thought she was at least twenty-three or twenty-four.”

  “That sexy video was the beginning of a lot of confusion for me,” Lyndall Locke recalled. “In the beginning, I was with the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. And then all of a sudden with the ‘No, No, No’ video, it was like, ‘Uh-oh. Now I’m with this real famous chick who is totally hot, and everybody on the planet knows it.’

  “I had always been this kid who was happy and self-confident,” he continued. “However, when Beyoncé started blowing up, I started to not feel comfortable in my own skin. People who knew me would come up to me and say, ‘Hey man! That’s your girlfriend?’ And I would say, ‘Yeah, I wish.’ That was my response to everyone: ‘Yeah, I wish.’ I started to think if I told people she was my girl, they wouldn’t believe it, and I didn’t want to have to prove it. She was becoming rich and famous, and I was just the same kid from Houston, no money, no direction . . . no nothin’. It started to mess with my head.”

  It was starting to affect Beyoncé, too. For instance, it seemed that she was beginning not to enjoy the attention she was getting as a result of the “No, No, No” videos. She’d tried to keep it a secret for as long as possible, especially from the other kids in the neighborhood. “We had a song that was about to go on the radio,” she told Welsh interviewer Steve Jones, “we had shot our music video. I was in eighth grade. And I didn’t tell a soul. Not one person. One day they just looked up and I was on television.”

  Jeff Harvey, a good friend of Lydia Locke’s and a sort of paternal figure to Lyndall (who refers to him as his “Uncle Jeff”), recalled that Lyndall would often bring Beyoncé to his large home in Katy, twenty-five miles west of Houston. “I can remember her always saying, ‘Uncle Jeff, please don’t tell anyone I’m here,’ ” he remembered. “I would tell her, ‘Beyoncé, no one knows who you are. You’re not famous yet, but okay, I won’t tell anyone.’ She would then go upstairs to the bedroom and stay there while the living room was full of people, especially if Lyndall was having a big swim party. My impression was that she wasn’t comfortable with getting recognized, with being singled out. I think she was shy.”

  “It’s definitely an adjustment,” Beyoncé conceded to Lyndall. “I don’t know what to do with it. It’s very confusing.” On this day, to Lyndall’s eyes, she was somehow already different. She wore a folded pink silk scarf around her forehead, her blondish hair exploding into an enormous mass of curls behind it. Wearing large hoop earrings with pink lipstick and matching eye shadow, she was still the old Beyoncé, but somehow now glossed up to near perfection.

  “You’re becoming a whole new kind of person,” he told her. “Aren’t you scared?”

  “I am,” she answered honestly.

  “I just wish we could have a normal life,” he told her.

  “Well, we don’t have a normal life,” she said, matter-of-factly. “We have this life.” Locked in on him and looking deeply into his eyes, she told him that she’d been preparing for success since the age of eight when she was discovered by Deborah Laday and Denise Seals. Then she added, “Maybe you should start thinking about what you want to do with your life, Lynnie.” She looked at him with such intensity, it was clear that she really meant what she was saying; she wanted him to start making some adult decisions about his future, indeed their future.

  Lyndall winced. He wanted to respond with authority, but he didn’t know what to say. Not everyone was as directed and as focused as Beyoncé. He certainly wasn’t—not at this time in his life, anyway. With her scrutiny on him so fixed and probing, he was at a loss. He felt cornered. “I might want to be . . . I don’t know . . . a chef, maybe,” he said, stammering.

  “Okay. That’s interesting,” Beyoncé said, taking it all in and nodding thoughtfully. “Well,” she began, “maybe you can be a personal chef for me, then.” Everyone knew that she couldn’t cook, she said, so someone would have to do it for her.
“It might as well be you. Right?” she asked.

  None of this was sitting right with Lyndall. Still, Beyoncé continued reasoning that if he were to become her personal chef they could spend more time together. “So, when do you think you’ll go?” she finally asked. “To school, I mean. Soon, right?”

  “Yeah, soon, I guess,” he answered.

  “Great,” she said, melting into his arms. “Soon, then.”

  First Impressions

  Destiny’s Child hit the road in the spring of 1998 on their first major tour, as an opening act for Boyz II Men. Their premier date was April 28 in Memphis, Tennessee, at the Pyramid Arena; Dru Hill and K-Ci & JoJo were also on the show. It was to be a grueling itinerary; the girls would definitely miss home. At one point, Beyoncé telephoned Tina back in Houston to complain about the hotel food. That was all Tina needed to hear. That night, she prepared a big pot of gumbo and froze it. At the airport, she somehow managed to distract the guards at the security checkpoint from seeing the pot as it went down the conveyer belt and through the X-ray. Finally, she met the girls at their stop and, as she recalled, “we heated up that gumbo and had a good ol’ time.”

  There were also dozens of press interviews while on the road, which also took extensive planning and forethought. “Don’t tell anyone how old you are,” Mathew had told Beyoncé before she left on her very first promotional tour with Destiny’s Child, in 1997. He always displayed an almost uncanny intuition about public relations. “I don’t want you to be child stars,” he told the girls. “Some child stars grow up and have no future. Or the public won’t let them grow up. No one needs to know your age.” This was not difficult for the girls to do. With their total self-assurance onstage while wearing revealing costumes with polished makeup and adult hairstyles, they looked anywhere from sixteen to maybe twenty-six.

  “I can’t teach you how to sing, but I will tell you that when you enter the room, your interview has begun,” their new publicist at the label, Yvette Noel-Schure, told Destiny’s Child. “Everything is on the record, what you say, what you did, if you were slumping in your chair—so don’t slump in your chair, because that’s going to be part of the description in the interview.”

  “I saw a very meticulous fourteen-year-old girl,” Noel-Schure would later recall of meeting Beyoncé. [Actually, Beyoncé was probably fifteen, maybe sixteen, when they met]. “To be so in-the-know at that age—I remember coming back to Sony and saying, ‘This is my project. I’m gonna have the time of my life with these girls.’ ”

  Noel-Schure added, “This is what I’m always gonna remember about Beyoncé: She takes you in. She looks you straight in your eyes when she’s talking to you. I said [to myself], ‘That is the trait of an honest person’—if you can look someone in the eye, a total stranger. In those days she was, ‘Yes, ma’am, yes, ma’am,’ to me, but she looked me right straight in the eye, did not blink, it seemed. I saw that boldness in her. To this day, when you talk to her, it’s the same thing. I always say, ‘Wow! You still do that.’ ” (Noel-Schure is still Beyoncé’s publicist all these years later.)

  Reggie Wells, the Emmy-winning makeup artist whose biggest claim to fame is his work with Oprah Winfrey, recalled, “Beyoncé was very interested in my life and what I had done with Oprah, with Whitney [Houston], and the others I’d worked for over the years. The first thing she said to me was, ‘My mother told me all about you, and I’m so impressed. I’m honored to be touched by you.’ That was powerful for someone just sixteen, very respectful.

  “What I noticed about her right away was that she made her own statement, which was: ‘Look at me. Give me your attention. Because I’m giving you something you’ve never seen before.’ All four girls were unique, and my job was to make each stand out in her own way. But Beyoncé was the one with the most imagination. You might go in thinking about her colors one way, but she would have an entirely different view, a look you may not even have thought of. You could not sit down and tell her what was going to work. She would tell you, and she would be right.”

  Shortly after the first album’s release, Beyoncé, Kelly, LaTavia, and LeToya enjoyed a celebratory dinner with friends and relatives, probably fifteen in all, at their favorite soul food restaurant, This Is It, in Houston. They ate oxtails, smothered pork chops, candied yams, fried chicken, and more food than their diets normally allowed. Beyoncé said she wanted “as much macaroni and cheese as possible.”

  “If Mathew finds out about all this food ruining our figures he’s gonna kill us,” LaTavia warned her friends. In fact, all four were more intimidated by Mathew now than ever before. With the stakes so raised, he was even tougher on them in rehearsals. Because Lonnie Jackson had been such a strict figure in their lives, they certainly knew how to bear up under pressure. However, Mathew took being a taskmaster to a whole new level. “He was a drill sergeant” is how LaTavia would put it.

  “Oh absolutely, he was hard on them,” said Sony’s Chad Elliott. “But he was focused on the big picture, and his approach was to be successful by any means necessary.”

  Much of Mathew’s attention was, of course, on Beyoncé. There were days when she felt she could do nothing right. She took it more in stride than the other girls, though, as if she well knew her father. Though he sometimes hurt her feelings, she rarely let him know it or see it.

  In the end, the girls couldn’t help but credit Mathew with their success, even though they had to sometimes question his methods. “Where was your mind tonight?” he demanded to know of Kelly after a recent show in Atlanta. “I watched you mess up twelve dance steps!” Now, a few weeks later as the girls celebrated their success, Kelly was able to be philosophical about it. “He’s the only father I ever had,” she said, “so I feel blessed. But, doggone it! He could be nicer! I mean . . . dang, Mathew!”

  “Honey, please! I been sayin’ that for years,” Beyoncé deadpanned, rolling her eyes.

  Tina, Stylist

  It was at around the end of 1998 that Tina Knowles began working for Destiny’s Child as the group’s stylist. She had always been a self-sufficient woman with her own business. In fact, she had credited the fact that she was able to remain in her challenging marriage to her sense of individuality—she had more in her life than just her marriage. It could be said, then, that this sense of independence was once again tested in 1998. On December 22 of that year, Mathew would go into rehab therapy for a second time. “In 1998, when I was treated a second time, they had a more defined definition [of his condition] of sex addiction,” he confirmed. “But sex addiction has such a broad range. My treatment was regarding my continued extramarital affairs.”

  As Mathew struggled with his demons, Tina did what she could to support him. However, in the end, she realized that it was really his battle to fight and, hopefully, to win. She found her greatest personal refuge in her own work with Destiny’s Child.

  At first, Tina was just doing the girls’ hair. However, on a trip to Cancún for an MTV special, their luggage was lost in transit, including their wardrobe. In an effort to help the girls out of a bad situation, Tina decided to try to pull something together for them to wear onstage. “I went to a little village and found some camouflage at a flea market,” she recalled, “and then I borrowed some camouflage pants from Wyclef Jean. In the end, the clothes for the girls came out so cute! Afterward, Wyclef came over and asked them, ‘Yo, who styled y’all?’ Beyoncé said, ‘My mom!’ and he said, ‘Well, you should do it all the time.’ ” At first Tina protested and explained that she was just filling in. “But after that, I started styling full-time,” she recalled. “At first I just wanted to be out with the kids so I could help protect them . . . but it wound up being a whole career for me.”

  Tina had been frustrated anyway by some of the clothing the girls were asked to wear, such as the revealing costumes in the “No, No, No” video. In her mind, not only did the wardrobe seem inappropriate for young girls, but a lot of it was in shades of gray and black, which made no sense to h
er. “I figured they would have years to wear all black,” she said. “They were young,” she reasoned, “and should wear bright colors.”

  “When the girls first started, we looked at tapes of Motown all the time,” recalled Tina, “and if you look at the artists from Motown, such as the Supremes or the Jackson 5, you were excited to see what they had on, what they were wearing. You know, Michael Jackson had the fringe, the Jackson 5 had the big apple hats, Diana Ross and the Supremes had the beautiful gowns. It was all so memorable and bigger than life. If you were sitting forty rows back, you could see the sparkle and the dazzle.

  “Mathew wanted to re-create Motown,” she continued. “He was always a big fan of Motown’s, and so we would watch tapes of those acts. Imaging was very important to Destiny’s Child. The record label, on the other hand, kept saying we needed to put the girls in jeans and T-shirts. That’s what Britney Spears was wearing and that’s what they thought the girls should be looking like too. But we didn’t want that.”

  Destiny’s Child always had great input with their appearance. They would tell Tina what they preferred and didn’t like, and were quite vocal about it. For instance, Kelly had an extremely small waist and enjoyed wearing midriff tops. Beyoncé had great legs and was always eager to show them off. The girls would cut out photographs of women in designs they enjoyed, and Tina would tape them on “inspiration boards” so that they could all agree on concepts.

  “I remember we were on tour somewhere in New York, maybe Buffalo,” Kim Wood Sandusky, who would soon become the girls’ vocal coach, recalled. “We had to get new shoes for the girls. We got the shoes in but they weren’t flashy enough. I walked into the dressing room and Tina was in there working on them with her niece, Angie, and assistant, Ty, the three of them very meticulously adding little jewels and sparkles to the shoes. ‘Look, I’m not very crafty, Tina,’ I said, ‘but let me help you.’ She laughed, handed me a glue gun, some sequins, and a high-heel and said, ‘Here! See what you can do!’ I sat there on the floor in the middle of the dressing room with beads, scissors, thread, needles—all of us in a circle working feverishly on these shoes. We were on a real tight timetable. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, man! They’re going to ask me to leave this little party, because I’m not nearly as fast as they are!’ But they didn’t, and we got it done! The girls wore the shoes that same night.”