Becoming Beyoncé

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Destiny Fulfilled

  Beyoncé Knowles started the year 2004 on a bright note by purchasing a jaw-dropping new estate, a modern mansion set on about three acres, for which she paid a million and a half dollars. Built in 1973, it was almost ten thousand square feet, with five bedrooms, five full baths, and two partial baths. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out at rolling, verdant hills and a lagoon-style swimming pool. The property was located in the gated community of tony Farnham Park in the prestigious Piney Point Village, west of downtown Houston.

  Beyoncé never intended to live in the new home. She’d already spent about a million bucks on a condominium in Miami just north of South Beach, and would soon buy two more units adjacent to it. Thus in October 2004, while she was in Milan attending Fashion Week, she would sign the opulent Houston estate over to Tina as a gift. Tina would remain in residence there until 2013. (In 2005, Tina would also purchase a condominium in Manhattan for a couple million dollars. Beyoncé would purchase a condo in the same building on the next floor.)

  Mathew and Tina had begun to live completely separate lives. Sometimes they would be together in the new lavish surroundings Beyoncé had gifted her mother, but sometimes they would not. Later, when Beyoncé and Jay moved in together, Tina would stay on one floor of the New York condo building and Mathew on the other. Though they’d arrive together in the lobby, they’d then retreat to their own floors.

  Most of the rest of 2004 was devoted to finishing another studio album for Destiny’s Child, their first since 2001, and completing another movie, The Pink Panther with Steve Martin.

  Beyoncé had originally intended to follow up her first solo album, Dangerously in Love, with a CD of tracks that had not been utilized on that debut. However, when Mathew suggested another Destiny’s Child album and tour, it felt like something she wanted to do. She missed Kelly and Michelle and wanted to reconnect with them. A true democracy was again shown, with all three sharing leads on songs that would be included on an album to be called Destiny Fulfilled. They would also share (along with a team of other songwriters) writing and producing credits, with the exception of “Bad Habit,” on which Michelle was replaced by Solange in both categories. Beyoncé coproduced all of the songs.

  It was during the recording of this album that the group realized it had reached the end of the line. In discussing their ambitions, they came to a fuller understanding of each other’s solo aspirations and decided that trying to coordinate those individual goals around the always hectic DC tour schedule would be impossible. Therefore, they decided that the group would break up after this album and one more tour.

  As owner of the Destiny’s Child name as well as the act’s manager, Mathew didn’t really want to see the group end. It wasn’t just business to him, either. He loved the idea of Destiny’s Child and never lost his appreciation for what its success represented not only in his life but also in those of his family members. It was no surprise that he’d given the group’s future a lot of thought. Back in 2003, according to some sources, his idea had been to add Solange to the act as a fourth member, then in 2005 to launch Beyoncé as a solo artist and continue DC as a trio—Solange, Kelly, and Michelle. Of course, all three girls would still tend to their solo careers.

  Could the group continue without Beyoncé? Probably. After all, the Supremes continued with a Diana Ross replacement for a few years and didn’t have nearly the kind of support Mathew promised Destiny’s Child, nor did they have the label support DC had from Columbia/Sony. If Mathew did intend to add Solange the biggest stumbling block to his plan was that he was the only one interested in implementing it. Not only did Solange not want to join the group, but Kelly and Michelle didn’t want to continue without Beyoncé. True to form, in 2003, Solange took the reins of her own career and released her first album on Columbia in association with Mathew’s Music World, with the telling name Solo Star. It didn’t do very well, though, peaking at just number forty-nine on the Hot 100 and disappearing after about a month. None of its singles even charted. (Today, Solo Star is a true collector’s item; it can’t even be purchased on iTunes!) Still, it was a start, and Solange was definitely more happy on her own than she ever would have been as a member of Destiny’s Child.

  Though there seemed to be no internal problems in the group, there was also a sense, admitted Kelly Rowland, that Destiny’s Child should break up “while we are still friends.” Her comment suggested that they were not so naïve as to think they were immune to the petty jealousies and insecurities that could contaminate their relationships with one another. They wanted to avoid those pitfalls as much as possible. The problem with their last album together—Destiny Fulfilled, which would be released in November 2004—was that because of Beyoncé’s immense superstardom, it felt somehow superfluous. Still, it made it to number two on the Billboard 200, generating two major hit singles, “Lose My Breath” and “Soldier.”

  The three young women in Destiny’s Child shared executive producer credit with Mathew on the album. According to observers, squaring what her cohorts wanted and what her father wanted—and how all of those ideas might coexist with her own—was extremely challenging for Beyoncé. As a growing artist, not being able to have complete freedom to realize all of her ideas would understandably be a frustration. But Mathew had ideas too. Not only was he very musical, but he understood what was viable in the marketplace, almost better than Beyoncé did. Beyoncé was esoteric and experimental in her taste. While many of her original ideas were good ones, Mathew didn’t always feel they would result in the massive record sales. It seemed as if the fact that on some level Beyoncé still wanted her dad’s approval made her capitulate more often than not.

  In her acknowledgment to Mathew in the album’s liner notes, Beyoncé couldn’t help but allude to the tension everyone noticed during the recording of Destiny Fulfilled. She wrote, “Dad. We really went through it this time around. I know it gets hard for U being my father and my manager; I know it’s hard to realize I’m a woman now. Know that U are my father first. My career means absolutely nothing to me without my family. I love U.”

  Schooling Each Other

  Despite her growing chemistry with Jay, there was still a formidable challenge ahead for Beyoncé if she was ever to be in a committed relationship with him. In order for it to work, she would have to open up to him, be vulnerable to him, intimate with him, and not just in the physical sense. Of course, she had always been more comfortable compartmentalizing her life, as she had done with Lyndall. However, Jay demanded more of her. He wanted to know who she was on every level—the frivolous to the important, the personal to the professional. Simply put, he was fascinated by her. He wanted to delve into all of the inner workings of her family as well as her business affairs. Since the Knowleses had always been such intensely private people, all of this was new terrain for Beyoncé.

  Making things all the more thorny was that Jay wasn’t exactly the most forthcoming person either, at least when it came to his business concerns. It was something he, too, was working on at this time. He confessed to Beyoncé that he’d never allowed any woman to know everything about his career and that it was a stretch for him to imagine that such a thing was possible. Therefore, they definitely had in common their shared inability to communicate—and their having to work on it for each other.

  It is also possible Beyoncé’s father was not completely open to the idea of his daughter sharing details of her private business dealings with others. The business of Beyoncé’s career had always been strictly a family affair, and if that was to now change it would likely have been a major adjustment for Mathew.

  “No way was she as business-savvy as Jay,” observed Jaz-O, “so you have to know that already Beyoncé was bouncing things off Jay, and he was advising her. Her father had done all of this in the past for her. With Mathew having been the only guy from the very beginning and now having to deal with the fact that suddenly there’s this other guy . . . and it’s Jay Z? That had to be tough.”
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  One of Beyoncé’s intimates recalls her as having said that the relationship with Jay Z was “like the blind leading the blind.” Something in her felt that it was necessary to see it through, though. Even Kelly Rowland said they should stick with it, that it would be in both of their best interests. “Sometimes I want to say, ‘Jay, please just shut up,’ ” Beyoncé said privately at the time. “But I know I can’t,” she concluded, “and he knows he can’t. So, yeah . . . we’re schooling each other, you might say.”

  At around this time—the summer of 2004—as Beyoncé considered the parameters of her relationship with Jay Z, he was in the process of ending his long-standing and pivotal relationship with Damon Dash and Roc-A-Fella Records. He’d been riding high with his hit “99 Problems,” and was anxious to make some changes. “It was a money issue,” recalled Choke No Joke, who still worked for Roc-A-Fella at the time. “Because they had another partner [Kareem ‘Biggs’ Burke], the profits had to be split three ways. They were spending a fortune on their first-class lifestyles, and Jay got to a point where he thought the expenditures were too high. For Jay to think that, you know they were high. There were other issues, too, having to do with their clothing line, Rocawear.”

  In 2004, Def Jam Records, which had owned a 50 percent stake in Roc-A-Fella, bought the label outright and named Jay as Def Jam’s president. Most of Roc-A-Fella’s artists followed Jay to the new label, including Kanye West. Then, in the fall of 2005, Jay bought Dame out of Rocawear, the hip-hop clothing line they’d owned together since 1995, which had generated millions for them. That transaction pretty much ended their relationship. The general consensus was that Jay stole Roc-A-Fella from Damon, then he stole Kanye, then he stole Rocawear. Actually, all of those were legitimate business dealings, but Damon later said he felt pressured into each of them. “[Jay] said, ‘It’s business,’ ” Dash recalled. “But we were always supposed to be about more than business, Jay especially. It’s like if your brother leaves you.”

  With Damon Dash now decidedly out of the picture, Jay would continue to amass his fortune, all the while romancing America’s sweetheart—as privately as possible, of course.

  Choke No Joke recalls an incident that underscores the importance Jay and Beyoncé placed on their privacy in these early days. As Roc-A-Fella’s videographer, Choke was once at the legendary Baseline recording studios in Manhattan documenting a session with one of the label’s artists. Choke filmed the performer in the vocal booth, as Jay and Beyoncé watched from behind the console in the control room. The two spoke between themselves, commenting on the performance they were witnessing, easily relating to one another. They were obviously happy together, seeming more comfortable than ever with each other.

  As the artist left the booth and walked through the control room, he nodded at Jay and Beyoncé as he walked past them on his way out of the studio. Continuing to tape him, Choke followed him into the hallway. Meanwhile, Jay watched, his eyes narrowing with suspicion. He rose and followed Choke in hot pursuit. “Hey! You filmed us,” he charged, catching up to him. “Me and Beyoncé, you secretly got us on film!”

  “What? No, dawg,” Choke said. “I was just filming the artist coming out of the booth and then through the engineer room. I didn’t film y’all.”

  “Yeah you did,” Jay angrily insisted. “Let me see that camera.” After Choke handed the camera to Jay, the rapper began to watch the video playback through the viewfinder. There was no footage of him and Beyoncé. “Oh, okay. Sorry,” he said with a shrug. “My bad.”

  “There was a little paranoia goin’ on”, Choke No Joke would observe years later. “I understood it, though. Jay told me he didn’t want what he had with Beyoncé to get ruined before it began. It was him and Beyoncé agreeing, ‘Let’s get to know one another before we tell the world and they start judging us, putting out crazy rumors before we even get a chance to know one another.’ We’d be out in public and they’d orchestrate it so that Beyoncé’s momma would sit between Beyoncé and Jay in order to prevent paparazzi from getting that one great shot they wanted so much, you know?”

  “From my vantage point, the love between them was a very slow burn that grew out of her respect for him,” said Beyoncé’s makeup artist at the time, Billy B. “She had such great admiration for his talent and for his accomplishments. Also, in Jay Z she had met someone who was as smart—maybe smarter—than she was, and she was not only intrigued by that but turned on by it as well. She felt she could learn a lot from him. I remember thinking, My God! I think she’s met the love of her life. I thought it was such a miracle for her, such a gift.”

  Choosing: Lyndall or Jay?

  When considering her parents’ marriage, Beyoncé was sorry they couldn’t have been happier together. She thought they deserved a better marriage. However, their relationship was their own, only they could totally understand it, and she knew she had no choice but to accept it for what it was. She also knew that she wanted a different kind of relationship with Jay than what her mother had with Mathew.

  Beyoncé had stayed in touch with Lyndall, even though she was incredibly busy. In March 2004 she went on the road with Alicia Keys and Missy Elliott for five weeks. After that, she began work on the Destiny Fulfilled album. In May, she began production on her next movie, The Pink Panther, in New York with Steve Martin. Though it would turn out to be a mediocre film when finally released in May 2006, it would consume her life for the next few months. In other words, she was as busy as ever. “We were still talking, though,” Lyndall recalled, “but then at one point she said, ‘I hate to tell you this, but Jay doesn’t want me speaking to you.’ I understood. What boyfriend wants his girl talking to her ex all the time?”

  It came to a head in July 2004 around the planning of a July 27 baby shower for Solange, who was pregnant with her first child. Solange, who was eighteen, was now married to her high school sweetheart, Daniel Smith, a college football player. (The two had married in February; Daniel Julez J. Smith Jr.—better known to his family as just Julez—would be born on October 18.)

  Solange still spoke to Lyndall from time to time and invited him to the shower. As a longtime friend of the family, she saw no reason why he shouldn’t be present. Yes, she’d been angry with Lyndall when he and her sister broke up, but when Beyoncé got over it, Solange got over it too. However, when Solange told Beyoncé that she’d invited Lyndall to the event, Beyoncé wasn’t sure how she felt about it. “Maybe you should ask Jay?” Solange suggested. Beyoncé agreed.

  With the passing of time, it’s likely Jay got tired of hearing Lyndall’s name. He was against inviting Lyndall to the impending baby shower and pointed out to Beyoncé that it was a family affair. Beyoncé duly telephoned Lyndall to tell him that she didn’t want him to come.

  When he hung up from her, Lyndall erased Beyoncé’s number from his cell phone’s contact list. “I was mad in the moment, but after thinking about it, on some level, I knew that it had to be over between us,” he explained. “For her sake as well as mine. Sometimes you need a clean break, and up until that time, Beyoncé and I never had one. It killed me, but I just had a feeling we needed to get off the merry-go-round, that neither of us would ever get to move on with our lives as long as we were in constant touch with each other, going round and round and round. But was it easy for me to do? Oh, no. Oh, hell no.”

  Beyoncé did the same. She couldn’t allow Lyndall to remain an issue between her and Jay; Jay now meant too much to her. Therefore, after almost eleven years of ups and downs and highs and lows, she and Lyndall were finally, once and for all, finished. It was sad, but it had to happen.

  Today, Lyndall Locke is a chef who owns his own catering business after having attended culinary school in 2002. He is successful and happy in life, having been in a stable relationship for many years. “After Beyoncé, I didn’t have a relationship for a long time,” he recalled. “I had some psychological issues about her to work out in my head before I could ever really try again with someone e
lse.”

  Lyndall and his present girlfriend have a young son, Lyndall Eugene Locke II. “Now that I’m older, I can say that it all worked out beautifully for me,” he said in 2015. “With Beyoncé, I learned a lot about what it meant to have a good woman, how to treat one, and also how not to treat one. I think in her life I represent this crazy guy from a much simpler, easier time. And for me, well, she’s still the first girl I ever kissed at that Brian McKnight concert so long ago, when we were little kids. That stays with you. I know Beyoncé will never forget about me, and I won’t ever forget her. I guess it’s true what they say: You don’t forget your first love.”

  PART SIX

  Dreamgirl

  The Problem with Dreamgirls

  When Beyoncé Knowles was cast in Dreamgirls, it seemed obvious to most people that she would all but walk away with the entire movie. After all, by this time, late 2005, the twenty-four-year-old was a major recording artist, having sold millions of records not only with Destiny’s Child but as a solo artist. Though she’d made a few films, they were not to much worldwide acclaim. So she definitely seemed on the verge of breaking out as a major star, provided that she could find the right vehicle.

  “I’m not Diana Ross,” Beyoncé always liked to say of herself, “and they are not the Supremes,” she’d conclude of the other girls in Destiny’s Child. It was ironic, then, that she thought a plum for her would be the Diana Ross character—“Deena Jones”—in the movie Dreamgirls. The Tony Award–winning Broadway show was loosely based on the iconic story of Ross’s rapid ascension to stardom and the negative impact it had on the girls with whom she sang in the Supremes, Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard.