Becoming Beyoncé

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  “Mathew was quiet for most of that conversation,” she recalled. “Simon did most of the talking. Then Mathew was like, ‘Okay. Great. Thanks so much for calling.’ He was nice to him. When they hung up, Mathew was elated. He said, ‘He needs to bow down! Beyoncé’s the queen. Beyoncé reigns supreme’ . . . and on and on with that kind of talk. But that was just Mathew. He was enamored of his own daughter, awestruck by her. She was his golden princess, to the point where sometimes I wanted to say, ‘Please, Mathew. Enough. Okay? Enough!’ ”

  Satisfied with Cowell’s apology to her dad, Beyoncé did end up traveling to the UK on December 13 to sing her song “Listen” as a stunning duet with Alexandra Burke. “It was still obviously in her head what I had said,” Simon Cowell recalled, “though I apologized. I was wrong. [That night] she sang better than anyone I’ve ever heard in my whole life. Then, at one point, she looked over to me as if to say, ‘Criticize that!’ Her eyes. I’ll never forget that look.”

  After Christmas 2008, Mathew and Alex went to Canada for two weeks to visit Alex’s family. Two months later, on February 17, 2009, Alex celebrated her thirty-eighth birthday. Mathew gave her some money she used to host a lavish party. “This was a very happy time for both of us,” she remembered.

  By the beginning of 2009, Beyoncé was twenty-eight and preparing to embark on the I Am . . . World Tour. Mathew still trying to do his job for her, taking charge as her ever-efficient, hands-on manager just as he’d been doing since she was a child. However, there seemed to be great change in the air.

  In March, Mathew and Alex spent ten days at the Wynn in Las Vegas, where Mathew negotiated a complex deal with Steve Wynn for a Beyoncé video shoot, which was to take place there on August 2. Her live concert would be filmed (and also recorded for CD release) at the Encore Theater and later released as I Am . . . Yours: An Intimate Performance at Wynn Las Vegas. It featured Beyoncé performing more than thirty songs, from her Destiny’s Child canon all the way through her solo career.

  Despite Mathew’s representing her in Vegas, Beyoncé was feeling a leaning toward making all pertinent decisions about her career. A year earlier, she had even decided to start her own management company, called Parkwood Entertainment (named, of course, after the address of the Knowleses’ former home in the Third Ward). Cadillac Records and Obsessed had both been made as a result of coproduction movie deals through Parkwood.

  “I started my own company when I decided to manage myself,” she would later say, even though she still technically was being managed by Mathew when she started Parkwood. It would have been more accurate—and fairer to her father, even—for her to say she was co-managing herself. “It was important that I didn’t go to some big management company,” she added. “I felt like I wanted to follow the footsteps of Madonna and be a powerhouse and have my own empire,” she further explained, “and show other women when you get to this point in your career you don’t have to go sign with someone else and share your money and your success—you do it yourself.”

  Alex and Mathew Expecting

  Before long, the distance between Beyoncé and Mathew became more profound; by the spring of 2009 it would seem they were speaking only intermittently, or maybe not at all. “For Beyoncé, it was business as usual,” said one person who knew her at this time. “She was on tour so there were a million things going on. People would ask, ‘Well, what does Mathew think?’ Because that was protocol, getting Mathew to weigh in on everything. I mean, you wouldn’t even think otherwise, ever. That’s how it had always been! She would say, ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s all good. I got it covered.’ So no one knew what was going on where her father was concerned. She didn’t seem upset or rattled about it, either. But, really, she never does. Sometimes it’s when she’s at her most casual that you suspect the worst.”

  “To be honest, I would have to say they weren’t speaking at all,” said Alex Wright of Beyoncé and Mathew. “I think by this time it was really fractured between them. All I know is that he told me they were not in communication.”

  While Mathew worked behind the scenes to solve the riddle of what might be going on with his daughter, Alex Wright says that the two of them discussed having children.

  Considering the tumult of his life, if in fact Mathew really was contemplating having children with Alex as she claims, perhaps he thought a new family would give him something positive to anticipate. After all, he had spent years working hard for the women in his life—Tina, Beyoncé, and Solange—only to now find all three of them at loggerheads with him for one reason or another. Maybe he felt he deserved some peace in his life, a respite from the harsh judgment.

  Alex became pregnant in May 2009. At around the same time, her mother, Enid, was diagnosed with cancer, making this a most challenging time for her family. The baby’s due date was February 7, 2010, her mother’s birthday.

  In June, when she was certain of the pregnancy, Alex and Mathew took a trip to San Francisco to spend three days visiting her brother Jonathan. It was there, on June 2—while Beyoncé was in Belfast on her world tour—that Alex told Mathew and her brother about the pregnancy. According to her, Mathew was exuberant. “He hoped it would be a boy,” she recalled. “His reaction was that it was a great thing,” concurred Jonathan.

  Mathew and Alex then flew to San Diego, where they had two beach houses, and celebrated with friends. However, while they were there, Mathew’s cell phone began blowing up with texts and e-mails. “From what I could gather, everything seemed to be completely unraveling in New York with Beyoncé,” Alex recalled. “It was getting bad.”

  After their time in San Diego, Mathew had their limousine driver pick them up for the ride back to Los Angeles. As Alex sat in the car with her feet on Mathew’s lap, she decided to probe a little to find out exactly what was happening with Beyoncé. “I actually don’t know what’s up,” Mathew said, sounding extremely worried.

  “What do you think you should do?” Alex asked

  He mulled it over. “I think I need to go to New York,” he decided. “Like right now. This very second.” Alex agreed. Mathew instructed his driver to take them straight to LAX. He hopped out of the car, suitcase in hand, and jumped on the next United flight to the East Coast. The driver then drove Alex back to the Beverly Hills residence. To her great surprise, Mathew returned the next day.

  “Eventually, over the course of the next few weeks, we learned the shocking truth,” Alex Wright continues, “which was that Beyoncé was having Mathew investigated. Apparently word had gotten back to her that there were some irregularities relating to money from the tour. She was about to have him audited.”

  Beyoncé’s Audit of Mathew

  She refused to believe it. When Beyoncé heard from the leading concert promoting firm Live Nation that Mathew might have been siphoning funds from her present “I Am . . . Tour,” there was simply no way she would accept it. Of all of the people in her life, she trusted her father the most. She had just recently told a reporter that he was someone she knew in her heart “would ride and die for me.” His relationship with Alex was obviously a sore spot for her. She loved her mother deeply and was loyal to her. Thus it had to have been difficult for her to reconcile that Mathew was living on the West Coast with another woman. Mathew had often told Beyoncé, “Business is business and family is family.” However, it had become increasingly difficult for her to separate the two where he was concerned, though she continued to try. Now, in light of these alarming allegations, things were bound to become much more complicated between her and her dad.

  Mathew would later explain that after Live Nation was unsuccessful in securing the rights to Beyoncé’s next tour, executives from the company had told her that he had drawn funds generated from the present I Am . . . Tour. It’s not known how much money was involved, but it had to have been a great deal, because that tour generated $119.5 million at the box office. In response to this stunning accusation, Beyoncé acted with great care. It would appear that she first con
fronted Mathew, who strenuously denied any wrongdoing. Mathew later said that he told Beyoncé, “The only way we will be able to understand this is through a court of law. That’s the only way either one of us will be clear if someone in our camps did something that was incorrect.”

  Beyoncé decided that she just had to know the truth. She hired the law firm Reed Smith LLP to conduct a thorough audit. This was a bold move and she knew it. It was bound to affect everything between her and Mathew.

  With the passing of time, as the audit was being conducted, things further deteriorated between Mathew and Beyoncé. “Even more business decisions were being made that excluded him,” Alex Wright recalled. “Her staff by now had just made it a habit to not loop him in on everything. Their relationship seemed in even greater jeopardy. Yet so much of his identity still had to do with who she was in his life, and who he was in hers. We realized, though, what few people in the world knew: that what was now happening would gravely alter the texture and the forecast of the future for everyone.”

  At the end of July 2009, Beyoncé wrapped up the North American leg of her world tour. She was exhausted and ready for it to be over. It had been a tough emotional experience, especially given what was secretly going on in the background, the disintegrating relationship with her father.

  Now that she would be back permanently, Mathew felt strongly that he again should go to New York to figure out once and for all the best course of action to take where his daughter was concerned. By this time, Alex was three months pregnant. While she hated to see him go, she knew he had no choice. “You have to figure this thing out,” she told him. “I will miss you, but I’m not a stupid woman, Mathew. I get it. Go. Please. Handle your business with Beyoncé.” Mathew would then leave the happy home he and Alex Wright shared in Beverly Hills, and return to Manhattan. “What I didn’t count on,” she says, “is that he would not be coming back.”

  Powder Keg

  Once he was gone from her, Alex says Mathew broke off contact. No phone calls. No e-mail. No texts. The reasons for Mathew’s decision to jettison her from his life were known only to him. Alex speculates, though, that when he returned to his “real” life—as opposed to the idyllic one he had created with her—he realized that it was in complete disarray. She could only assume it was as if he had enjoyed a lost weekend that lasted two years, and was then forced to return to the stark reality of his true existence. “I think he felt he had to step back into his family, live that life he had with them, and act as if nothing had happened,” she says.

  It felt to some as if Mathew also wished to go back in time and maybe reclaim some of the feeling of triumph and victory he’d felt with the success of Destiny’s Child. Chad Elliott, who was vice president of A&R at Columbia, recalls visiting Mathew in Houston at around this time for a meeting. “Come with me,” Mathew said, “I have something to show you.” Elliott and two other record company executives, Kawan Prather and Guy Rouette, piled into Mathew’s brand-new S-Class Mercedes-Benz and went for a drive. Mathew drove them to the Third Ward, to the home on Parkwood, the one he and Tina had to sell before it was repossessed by the bank. “You could see on his face how much this journey meant to him,” recalled Elliott. “He said, ‘This neighborhood is where it all began for me and Beyoncé. This was the beginning. All my savings were depleted,’ he recalled, ‘all my credit cards maxed.’ ”

  While they were cruising down Parkwood, Mathew’s car suddenly began to sputter just as it reached the house at number 3346. “Oh no!” he groaned. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said as the vehicle came to a halt right in front of his former home, “but we just ran out of gas.” Mathew couldn’t help but laugh at the irony. “Me being a show-off and this happens?” he noted with self-deprecating humor. One can’t help but wonder whether or not he also recognized the symbolism of running out of gas at the site of where it all began, especially given that it now all seemed to be ending. If he did, he got over it quickly and proceeded to turn a potentially embarrassing scene into a memorable moment. The four men got out of the car and, in a muggy, 100-degree Houston day, trudged a mile and a half to a gas station for fuel, Mathew all the while chatting up former neighbors and friends from the block, reminiscing about the good old days, shaking hands and slapping shoulders as if running for office. “I saw then the sheer brilliance of this man as a public relations strategist,” said Elliott. “He had this way of penetrating your soul when he looked at you, and the people we ran across that day adored him. It was amazing to watch, like bearing firsthand witness to his magical rags-to-riches story.”

  If only the magic could have lasted . . .

  Predictably, because of Beyoncé’s audit, the money Mathew had been spending on his lifestyle with Alex on the West Coast became an issue. The accountants wanted a fuller understanding of how he was financing it. In some ways, the situation was reminiscent of the Andretta Tillman estate legal battle years earlier when allegations were made accusing Mathew of having spent business money on a secret personal life. “That’s when he cut me off financially,” Alex claims. “I wasn’t angry. It’s what one does when one panics.”

  In August, Alex tracked Mathew down in Las Vegas. When she called him, she heard Beyoncé performing in the background; her show was in the process of being recorded at the Encore at Wynn for its DVD release, as per the lucrative deal Mathew had struck back in March. “I could hear the sheer excitement of it all, her amazing voice in the background, the audience’s huge response to it,” she said, “and I could also hear in Mathew’s voice that he was high on the entire experience. That really set me off. As we spoke, he was completely dismissive of me. It felt to me like he was stepping back into his power, that he was now Mathew Knowles again, and that I and the baby were a thing of the past. That one phone call changed the trajectory of everything. Now I was angry.”

  The next time Alex saw Mathew, it was on television sitting next to Beyoncé at the MTV Music Awards broadcast on September 12, 2009, from Radio City Music Hall in New York. This public appearance was business as usual for Beyoncé. As always, she would push aside any turmoil and do what she had to do to present family solidarity for the sake of her career. “She was fine,” said one member of her team. “Truly, if she was upset, you would never know it. She looked beautiful, she was in good spirits. I heard there was this big, high-stakes drama playing in the background between her and her father. But then I saw them together, smiling and happy, and I thought, ‘Really?’ They sure looked fine to me. I thought either everything was peachy-keen, or she’s the greatest actress in the world. I also thought maybe she was just too busy to deal with it, especially that night.” Jay was also very busy at this time. In fact, he was about to release what would be one of the biggest records of his career, “Empire State of Mind,” with Alicia Keys, from his eleventh studio album, The Blueprint 3, which was presently at the top of the charts.

  It was during the MTV Music Awards program that Kanye West—annoyed because Beyoncé hadn’t won the award for Best Female Video for “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)”—famously interrupted Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech. Swift had won for “You Belong with Me.” “Yo, Taylor, I’m really happy for you and I’mma let you finish,” Kanye said after grabbing the mike from her. “But Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time!” The camera then shot over to a visibly mortified Beyoncé. Meanwhile, Taylor stood onstage stunned and speechless until the network finally went to a commercial break. Afterward, she burst into tears backstage. Later, when Beyoncé won for Best Video of the Year, she made her way to the stage and recalled her excitement at having won her first VMA when she was the seventeen-year-old lead singer of Destiny’s Child. She then said, “I would like for Taylor to come out and have her moment.” It was a classy move, much appreciated by the young pop star Swift.

  What caught Alex’s attention wasn’t Beyoncé’s magnanimous gesture, it was Mathew’s contentment as he sat next to her in the audience. “I was no longer hearing from hi
m, and it was becoming clear to me that he was trying to resume his former life without me,” she recalled. “So . . . I hired a lawyer.”

  At the end of September 2009, Alex’s legal team learned that Beyoncé was to be honored at a high-profile function hosted by Billboard in New York; she was set to be named the publication’s Woman of the Year. Because this was such a prestigious honor, they suspected that Mathew would be present for it. They had been trying unsuccessfully to serve him with paternity papers for weeks, and it was decided to do so at the Billboard function on October 2. They even thought to use a female process server because they figured she would be more likely to get close to Mathew.

  The deed was done; Mathew was served at the Billboard event without incident.

  Though the Knowleses decided to try to remain calm, at least in public, things would reach a fever pitch in the public arena just the same. Because Mathew had been served at such a high-profile event, it was now known by the media that Beyoncé’s dad had a mistress in Los Angeles who was pregnant. Someone from the popular website TMZ called Alex’s attorney Neal Hersh to give him twenty minutes’ warning before publishing a story about the scandal. Then, like a complete powder keg, it exploded at 9:15 p.m. Pacific coast time on the TMZ website.

  Fractured Souls

  On November 6, 2009, with his daughter now on tour in Egypt, Mathew Knowles returned to Los Angeles. “He showed up at our house unannounced at about 3:45 in the afternoon,” Alex Wright recalled, “and I just remember him coming up the stairs very, very slowly. He has such bad knees, and they now seemed worse than ever. He seemed much older to me, worn down. He had on the exact same blue shirt and jeans he’d worn on the day I met him at Microsoft. I had to blink a couple of times, it was so surreal. I hadn’t seen him since I served him at Beyoncé’s function, and I didn’t know what to expect.”