For whatever reason, it was Bernice who got the Call; not only that, it was the right Call, according to her talents and gifts. She had an ability to reach her zenith through preaching, to move an audience via spoken word, to minister, even though she claims to have no memories of our father. Granddaddy was dead. He’d found no successors among his grandsons.
I was in the congregation for Bernice’s first sermon. She gave it at Ebenezer, on March 27, 1988. She called it “Getting above the Crowd,” and based it on the story from the Book of Luke, about Zacchaeus, a short man who climbed a sycamore tree, the better to see Jesus. Fittingly, she gave this message in the sanctuary at Ebenezer, where I had seen my father and grandfather speak so many times. Bernice had fasted for seven days before she gave the sermon. She seemed to me to be in another realm that Sunday. She is unique. Bernice is singular, unto herself; her individualism would be a strike against her later on.
We all were there that Sunday—Mother, Yolanda, Martin, me. A light shined in Mother’s eyes, a light I had not seen in a long time, as it did in the eyes of many of our cousins and extended family. When Bernice spoke that day, I could see she’d inherited much from our father—certain hand gestures that startled me in their familiarity. I’d not seen them in so long—a certain tilt of her head, a lilt in her voice, strategic pauses, drawing out words— seeeen—or making multisyllabic certain words, the opening twist of humor, even the looks on her face that were exactly the kinds of looks that my father had. It was eerie. I think Bernice was oblivious to these similarities.
Bernice came in knowing how to preach, but she needed to learn how to pastor. Rev. Roberts advised her to take her apprenticeship elsewhere, because she had grown up in Ebenezer and might benefit from outside experience. She took his advice and went to minister at the Love Center at Greater Rising Star Baptist Church in southwest Atlanta. She became an assistant to Pastor Byron L. Broussard, and she dealt primarily with youth and women’s ministries. It seemed strange not to have a King somewhere in the pulpit in Ebenezer.
My spiritual crisis had begun with my father’s death, and continued with my uncle’s death and my grandmother being gunned down. Ever since, whenever I have had a question of faith, Bernice has helped show me the way.
What about my other siblings? Were they proud of Bernice, yet disappointed in me? I’m sure they were caught in a difficult position. I think they never understood why I had to leave the King Center. Mother didn’t really understand it, and they seemed to follow her lead. There may have been a feeling that maybe I walked away from it because I wasn’t mature enough to handle the pressure, didn’t have the stuff of Kings. I didn’t ask and they didn’t say. Later, once they saw subsequent events and we’d talked about it, they understood. We couldn’t always talk about it initially, it was just so heated that it became more of a divisive conversation than a productive one. So we just kind of steered clear of it as a family. I think there was this feeling that maybe I brought some of this on myself, but I never felt that way.
Bernice confided in me that she had also had dreams. She dreamed of our father, back when we had that retreat in the north Georgia mountains in 1988 and Mother asked if any of the four of us would volunteer to succeed her at the King Center. Bernice dreamed that Daddy appeared and expressed concern about Mother and the King Center; that she needed time for herself. Suddenly Bernice saw me appear in the dream and at that point she awakened from her sleep. She later concluded I was the one to succeed mother.
Bernice told me she’d had another dream since our retreat. In her dream, Daddy was sitting at his desk. Bernice was sitting across from him. He reached across and held her hands. Then she said I came in, and our father smiled and looked at me and said, “Dexter,” and put Bunny’s hands in mine. Bernice said in her previous dreams about our father, he was chasing her, gliding after her. But now she had no fear. When she told me that, it humbled me. Scared me a little too.
Bernice asked me to trust the Bible. I told her I didn’t know it as well as she did. Now I had an opportunity to learn more about it, through my eyes and hers.
I came back into the King fold around ’92. I told Mother I still wanted to have involvement with the family, with the legacy, but from another perspective. Consulting with my best friend Phil, I began to focus not on the King Center but the King Estate, the business and cultural side of the legacy. They were separate— licensing, intellectual property, creative projects—an open book. Bernice left the Ebenezer fold. I knew I must work with the King Estate, must not give up on the legacy, must be true to it. The question was, how?
CHAPTER 14
A Moving Image
My mother had always dreamed that a big, important movie would be made about my father’s life to honor him and his message, much like the movie Gandhi had honored its subject. In 1992, Spike Lee released Malcolm X through Warner Bros. studio. The film was launched amid a firestorm of publicity. Everywhere I went people asked, “When is a movie about your father coming out?” Not to take anything away from Malcolm X’s story, but I had to agree that a movie about my father made sense. Movies are central to our culture—they’re the way into the collective consciousness and a way to continue for each generation. At one time it was books, radio, newspapers, billboards. Now it is television and movies. And music. We had the story. We had the fascinating character. We just needed a way in.
For what I had in mind, I’d need help, big-time—somebody who knew the ins and outs of the filmmaking business. Two associates would back me. One was Phillip Jones. He became key to virtually all the plans of the King Estate and Intellectual Properties Management (IPM), the company he set up.
The other was Michelle Clark Jenkins, a New Jersey native who had graduated from Princeton in 1976 and had gotten a law degree while working in New York for Time Inc. She had been a business affairs manager for HBO, and had worked in several divisions in what was later to become Time Warner. I first worked with Michelle when she was at HBO and she produced the video for the King Holiday record. Later, she would come to Atlanta, at my request, to run the King Estate.
In 1990, Michelle Clark Jenkins took a job offer from Bob Johnson, head of Black Entertainment Television, to go to L.A. and develop films at Tim Reid’s production company. One of the first projects they worked on was Once upon a Time When We Were Colored. She kept in contact with Phil, and he aligned her with me after Malcolm X came out. That was how we came to be in L.A. together, trying to get a film made about my father.
“So we’re talking biopic,” Michelle said. We had nerve, thinking it could be done. But Michelle knew the terrain and thought we had a good shot. Through her I learned that the film industry felt there had been so much out there on the subject of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Civil Rights Movement of the ’50s and ’60s that the story had been told. We felt there hadn’t been enough told.
There’s never really been a feature film made about my father. King, a ’70s TV movie with Paul Winfield and Cicely Tyson, was only adequate. I have respect for Cicely and Paul as actors, and Ossie Davis, and the other key people who were in it, but the story was too one-dimensional to me. That production was an Abby Mann made-for-TV movie in 1977. The overall texture was lacking—a lot of it had to do with the technology then. Just seemed like it was a little rushed, maybe.
We were on the set for that. It was shot in Macon, Georgia, and all of us children had some extra roles. Yolanda actually had a speaking part. She portrayed Rosa Parks. That turned into an uneasy experience because what the finished product ended up being was not what we’d believed it would be. Abby Mann was famous for the long-running TV series Kojak. Paul Winfield played Daddy. Everybody I’ve ever seen portray Dad, they sort of overdo his piety. It’s like they’re forcing a presence on you; it’s actually their perception of that presence being forced—that’s not what he was. That wasn’t his approach. His was natural, a presence that spoke for itself. My point is, we just felt something was needed: the right person had to
be involved, and we needed not only to have somebody who got it creatively, but who could also get it done. This was twenty-five years later, a new day.
The whole purpose of the many trips I made to L.A. during this period was to identify a director, a studio, a producer, and a “bankable” star who could “open a picture,” and who would be not only willing but eager to do a definitive King project. The whole point was that we always felt there had not been a definitive film done. There hadn’t been a film about Dad’s life showing not so much the icon or the serious, public, celebrated person, but rather the man in terms of a very interesting and gripping story. It had never been done.
So we felt like we needed someone who could do it justice.
The first person Phil and I thought of was Spike Lee, the old homecoming coronation director at Morehouse who in the intervening years had become the controversial and internationally famous film director. He had shot Malcolm X starring Denzel Washington, and I gathered it was not easy to get funding, not easy in any way. Phil called Spike. Spike didn’t bite—either it wasn’t a challenge to him, or he was tired because it had taken such a monumental effort on his part to get Malcolm X made.
Michelle set up meetings with movers and shakers in the Hollywood scene. It was just Michelle and me. I stayed with her and her family in the foothills of Pacific Palisades, between the beaches of Santa Monica and Malibu. In the down time I’d sit and look at and listen to the breakers rolling in, looking westward, and for the first time in my life I knew peace. This place was calling to me. I was serving as the administrator of the King Estate, away from the political machinations of the actual day-to-day operation of the King Center.
* * *
We met with Frank Price, a former head of Columbia Pictures, who still had an office on the lot, and had kind of “godfathered” director John Singleton. He broke a lunch date to meet with us and was very accommodating, and it made me feel like if we could come up with a director, a script, and a star, we might get a studio interested—maybe the studio he was aligned with.
Then we started meeting with what’s called the “talent.”
We met Ed Zwick at his office, in Santa Monica. I was impressed that he was the only one who met with us—by then I’d learned that Hollywood types are usually bracketed by yes-men whom they treat awfully no matter how many times they say yes. It was just Michelle, him, and myself, and I really liked him; that one was really my initiative. I had asked for Ed Zwick, really liked his approach directing Glory, and while in the end I felt Glory was a tragic movie, it was a triumph of historical re-creation and dramatization as well. It moved me. Very few movies have done that.
Glory was a good movie, but again, in Hollywood translation, it didn’t do big box office. Michelle said that was because you didn’t have repeat business, where, in particular, fourteen to twenty-five-year-olds went to see it four or five times. The ending was depressing; one viewing was enough.
Ed Zwick was polite, quiet, didn’t ask a lot of questions but had a few, was an unassuming person, laid-back, seemed very interested; but then, everybody we met with was interested. Not one person said, “This isn’t something I’d be interested in,” or “It’s not up my alley.” Michelle and I approached it more like we were feeling people out, wanting to get different perspectives.
We met with actor/director Bill Duke in a restaurant in the Valley, Burbank, I believe, just Bill, myself, and Michelle. Bill had an assistant who was kind of around the periphery, but she wasn’t actually sitting there during the meeting. We saw her at the beginning and at the end. Bill Duke had directed films like Deep Cover, A Rage in Harlem, and The Cemetery Club. He was about to join the faculty at Howard University as head of its film department. He was very passionate about our proposed project, really seemed he wanted to do it himself, but he also felt it needed to be done right. His whole thing was, “You can’t hurry it—you don’t want to rush through this. This needs to be done by somebody who really gets it.” I agreed with Bill Duke.
Duke’s opinion was that we couldn’t allow people on board if they were just looking to take advantage; he also believed in having an African American in the process, if that person was among the best producers, screenwriters, or directors; somebody who knew how to make a film. He felt we needed to make sure “Dr. King” was portrayed strongly. He kept saying, “People need to get his full impact. Many think he was just some kind of wimp when in fact he was a revolutionary with a transcendent ability to move audiences and individuals through the power of his cause, his presence, the power of his speaking ability and action.”
He got it. No question in my mind Bill Duke got it. I was sure he could get the ball rolling, but he was clear he’d need backing. No knock against him. That was our challenge.
Producer George Jackson was passionate as well. In recent years, he died of a heart attack. We met at a restaurant on Sunset. I was beginning to know my way around L.A., and I was beginning to like it. First of all, nobody seemed to recognize me, or, if they did, they didn’t stop or stare or point or have some hustle they wanted to run by me. I liked being anonymous under the azure skies of Southern California. This was agreeing with me big time. I mentioned this to Michelle and to George as we sat down to lunch. George smiled. “That’s the way it happens,” he said. “You get bit.” He seemed to have a passion for the project. He and his partner, Doug McHenry, were involved in a number of films during this period—Disorderlies, Jason’s Lyric, several others. We met Doug later; this first time it was just George Jackson, and he was reverent about Daddy. He said, “It’s got to be done. It’s a powerful film.” He even talked about the importance of telling it right: every detail, from scenery, set design, the works. He spoke in the curious grammar of film, which I must admit mystified me somewhat, but I had Michelle break it down into English later. George got technical, down to the nuts and bolts of re-creating certain scenes, texture. He was excited about the prospect.
We walked away from Bill, George, and Doug with possibilities. Here were some people who would be interested, but we hadn’t met anyone with the ability to green-light a project. Without a script, we didn’t have a project. They all said, “We’d have to get a studio behind it.”
So we ended up meeting with a couple of people in the studio system as well, among them Ashley Boone at MGM, now deceased. We were trying to get advice on how to pull together a project. Everybody seemed positive from both the studio side and the creative side. They all seemed pumped. We met with HBO Films; as I’ve mentioned, Michelle was once Director of Business Affairs at HBO, so she knew people there. We were thinking, “Let’s not restrict ourselves, talk to everybody,” in case HBO was looking at that time to ratchet up their feature film division, and we felt like maybe we could get kind of both angles, cable TV audiences and feature-release quality.
Everybody was interested, intrigued, but the ones who asked the hard questions would say, “What is there really new you can tell us about Dr. King’s story? Haven’t we heard it all?” That was their feeling. We said, “No, you really haven’t.” The public has often seen only a very one-dimensional character and not the full three-dimensional person. Particularly in African Americans’ stories and lives, we don’t portray them as human beings with feelings and emotions and complexities of humor, pathos, conflict. When I read my mother’s book My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr., I was in tears when she talked about what she went through in making a decision to come south after they both went to school and met in Boston, to come back to the land of their ancestors’ struggle, in a time of segregation, knowing they’d have to struggle, knowing what they’d be giving up, things they shared as a couple. They were well-rounded, talented people who were going to have to come back to a segregated South and give up what could have been a life of comfort, of learning, of travel. To me, there are other stories within the bigger story that need to be revealed. That’s where Gandhi or Malcolm X showed that kind of epic range. My mother and I met with Sir Richard Attenbor
ough, who had directed Gandhi. He felt a feature biopic about my father should be done by an African-American director. He was also adamant that though the screen-writer didn’t have to be black, the story had to be well-written and original.
We did meet with Denzel Washington and his production company head, an extremely observant and competent woman named Debra Chase. We met at his office, on the Columbia lot. Debra and he thought this was a good idea. He seemed interested. I think what intrigued him was showing another side of the man. A lot of people saw Washington as Malcolm at the time; a juxtaposition of Malcolm and my father was often portrayed as two opposites. However, I felt Malcolm and my father bore the same frustrations, had similar dilemmas, longings, obstacles, and desires for their people to be truly free. But due to the circumstances of their lives, one approached it differently; sometimes you do things not so much because of the emotion of just getting the anguish out, but because you want to be effective, and my father was at root a Gandhian, with nods to Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience and Reinhold Niebuhr.
Somehow, I must’ve said something that resonated with Denzel—it could have been merely the challenge of portraying both men, getting lost in both characters. I can still see his face changing, him saying, “Yeah,” like he was getting it. People are amazed if they see the story generationally, my father and grandfather’s relationship, where my grandfather was personally a forceful man who would tolerate no mistreatment of himself, yet he was a product of his era. Meanwhile, my father was utterly nonviolent, and yet confrontational of the dilemma. He overturned a system with which his father had bargained. The father was converted by his son, based on the proof being in the pudding. My grandfather observed my father’s method, saw how it worked. It actually was effective. He had to be convinced; once he was convinced, he tried it and again it worked. It may have saved my grandfather’s sanity after nearly everything he loved was killed. He might not have survived the tragedies if he hadn’t changed. They would’ve eaten him up inside; you can’t give to others when you’re preoccupied. Grand-daddy saw the potential for hypocrisy within Christianity, being a minister of the gospel. At some point you’ve got to be accountable to what you say you believe. The difference between a great person and somebody who appears great is, one lives it and the other talks it. My father talked and lived it.
Growing Up King Page 18
