Just as I Am

by Cicely Tyson

  “How do you go about becoming a model?” I asked him.

  “You connect with an agent and you go to modeling school,” he explained. “Once you’ve finished your training, the agent sends you out on interviews for jobs.” He paused and looked me up and down, as if to be sure his original assessment had been accurate. “You really should give it a shot,” he said. I smiled, politely thanked him, and went on about my way to the store.

  I initially disregarded the stranger’s comments. Me, a model? The idea seemed outlandish, given that I was almost thirty years old and presumably well past a model’s prime time. And yet our conversation curled up in my spirit, the way certain notions do when they’re set on residing permanently. And right alongside that hmmm was the feeling I’d been grappling with, the sense that my work as a secretary was not the end of the career road for me, but rather a milestone along an alternate route. So acute was this feeling that one week after that businessman stopped me on the sidewalk, I pulled out the Yellow Pages. I flipped to the section labeled “Modeling Schools” and scanned the list of agencies. All of them, based on the names and locations, seemed headed by white folks. They’re not going to take me for no modeling job anyhow, I thought. I slammed the book shut.

  Yet I continued to ponder the idea and even mentioned it to my longtime friend Thelma Jack. The two of us had met years earlier during our young teens at a summer camp upstate. Thelma’s face lit up when I told her what the man had proposed. “You know, there’s a woman in Harlem who runs a modeling school,” she told me. “Her name is Barbara Watson. She’s the daughter of Judge Watson”—as in James S. Watson, the first Black judge elected in New York City, and husband to Violet Lopez Watson, a founding member, along with Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, of the National Council of Negro Women. In 1946, Barbara Mae Watson, the eldest of four, founded the first agency for African-American models. Emboldened by my friend’s encouragement, and armed with this fresh data, I called the school. Ms. Watson herself answered. I stammered my way through a conversation, and she saved me from my bluster with a concluding request: “Why don’t you come in for an interview?”

  I got right to work on preparing. I may have known nothing about a catwalk, but I was confident I could put on a fashion show, one I prayed would impress this well-spoken, Barnard-educated lady who’d been gracious enough to invite me in. My favorite color was light blue, and my closet teemed with the hue: blue tea-length hoop skirts, blue pocketbooks, blue everything. Years later, I grew into purple, but it never stole blue’s spotlight. “Don’t you know any other color?” my mother would ask me. I never wearied of its soothing quality, its ability to transport me to a wide-sky, cloud-dappled tranquility.

  So for my inaugural meeting with Ms. Watson, I of course fished out my finest powder-blue cotton dress, one gathered at the waist, with a row of glistening gold buttons stretching down its left side. I completed the look with black suede pumps and silk thigh-high stockings, minus garters. Like many working-class West Indian women, I secured each stocking with a top knot tight enough to cut off one’s circulation. I was blessed to even have silk nylons. During the war, silk and other commodities had run in short supply, and as a result, nylon repair shops sprang up. My spot was a little cleaners in a basement, around the corner from the Red Cross. Before my interview, I took my nylons there, and child, once they fixed my two runs for five cents each, those stockings looked brand new. People then took such pride in their workmanship.

  On the day I stepped my suede toe over Ms. Watson’s threshold, I strutted in like I was working a Paris runway. She scanned my outfit, smiled, and offered me a seat.

  “So have you done any modeling at all, Miss Cicely?” she asked.

  “No, ma’am, I have not,” I said, carefully pronouncing each word.

  “I see,” she said. She then asked me a few questions about my background, as well as how I’d learned about the agency. I gave her the short story as she jotted down notes on an intake form. “Well,” she finally said, leaning back in her seat and laying down her pen, “what would you think about having some photos taken?”

  I nodded. “That would be, I mean . . . yes, Miss,” I said, trying to contain my glee.

  “Excellent,” she said, standing up to show me out to the lobby. “And in the meantime, I hope you’ll sign up for our course.”

  Nearly before she’d completed that sentence, I’d enrolled. The evening course, which included about twenty-five women, spanned several weeks. Ms. Watson taught us the fundamentals of charm and poise: how to perfect our postures, how to hold our bodies as we glided across a room with effortlessly supple movement, how to pose for photographers, how to pivot and curtsy and smile. At five-feet-four-inches tall, I wasn’t runway material, so I kept my ears widest for the catalog and magazine model training. Meanwhile, I began work on my portfolio. I arranged for a photographer to take three images of me: a head shot in a (navy) suit, a body shot in a (baby blue) dress, and a swimsuit shot in a (teal) two-piece suit. The latter was quite modest—nothing like today’s dental-floss bikinis that leave one’s derriere hanging out. If I’d been required to don such a suit, this church girl would’ve ended her modeling career before it began. But I was comfortable in my portfolio bikini, one cut just below the navel—and one just like those I wore to the beach.

  Once I’d received the photos, I scheduled a session with Ms. Watson to show her the spread. Her business partner, Mildred Smith—who also served as an editor at Our World magazine, a lifestyle publication catering to Black women—attended the meeting. The two looked through my photos, closely studying each. Neither said a word. “Can you please give us a few moments to speak?” Ms. Watson finally said. “Yes, of course,” I said, my heart hammering away in my chest. The women then stepped off to the side and out of my earshot—likely so they could decide how to run me out of that office, I feared.

  After what felt like hours but was probably three minutes, they turned to me. “So how many copies did you have made of each of these photos?” Ms. Watson asked.

  “Well I didn’t know what you would expect,” I said, “so I just got a few.”

  “Well,” she said, “we’d like to order a few hundred more on your behalf.”

  I gulped. “Really?” I said, my eyes widening.

  “Yes, really,” she said, smiling.

  While I’d decided I was about to be banished from modeling schools the world over, the women had been discussing my strategic launch: how to saturate the market with my photos. In my class of potential models, only two were ultimately chosen. I, daughter of a housekeeper, child of the Most High, was astoundingly one of them.

  I did not resign from the Red Cross, at least not right away. In the early days of my new modeling career, I had no reason to believe this little venture of mine would be anything more than a leisure pursuit. A hobby wouldn’t pay Joan’s tuition. Still, I poured my soul into the project. Ms. Watson, of course, rounded up opportunities for me. And I, rather than high-tailing it to Lord & Taylor at noon, scoured the avenues of the city, turning up cold at magazines and women’s catalog companies and offering my portfolio. Every one of us bears the wounds and characteristics our parents unwittingly pass onto us, and likewise, we receive their most admirable tendencies. Willie and Fredericka, bare-knuckled and unremitting, handed their work ethic to me.

  I booked a few catalog gigs immediately, bolstering my excitement that modeling might be my ticket out of a years-long sentence as a secretary. The jobs were small, but I loved the work, just loved it: the posing and the grinning, the rapid-fire click-click-click of the camera, and of course, the bottomless well of beautiful clothing. I suppose to be truly successful at any pursuit, you have to fall in love with it, surrender to its gravitational pull, allow it to carry you off to that world of giddy sleeplessness.

  Speaking of shut-eye, I got little. I pecked my way, nine to five on weekdays, through my work at the Red Cross before making my evening rounds with portfolios spilling from my satchel. The
n after my 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift in the secretarial sweatshop two nights a week, I dashed home with just enough time to shower, brush my teeth, and limp back out the door. From the start, I viewed modeling for what it was—a business, an income generator. The fact that I saw it as such is why the bashfulness of my youth naturally fell away, because believe me, I have never been shy about making money. The most potent antidote to reticence is survival.

  The gigs at first trickled in, and then flooded. In the beginning, I modeled anything and everything: shoes and handbags and hats and swimsuits and even wigs for local hair salons. Those entry-level jobs put me on the map in the modeling community, and before long, I was landing covers and spreads for major magazines such as Ebony, Jet, and of course the publication where Ms. Mildred Smith worked, Our World. It was there, one afternoon in early 1955, when God breathed in my direction yet again.

  On my way out of a meeting with Ms. Smith, I spotted a woman in the waiting room. As I passed, she gave me the once-over and I, thinking nothing of it, nodded courteously and hurried back to the Red Cross. I didn’t know it at the time, but that woman happened to be Evelyn Davis, an actress. When Evelyn went in to see Ms. Smith, she asked her, “Who was that young lady who sashayed out of here?”

  “She’s a model working with Barbara Watson,” she said. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because I just came from an interview for a movie,” she said, “and they are looking for a young lady who looks just like her to play the lead.”

  I hadn’t been back at my work desk for more than three minutes when the phone rang. “I think I got you a movie,” said Ms. Smith, hardly breathing between each word.

  “A movie?” I said. “What are you talking about, a movie?” She explained what Evelyn had mentioned and then concluded with, “And can you believe you look just like the young lady they’re looking for?! Evelyn can arrange for you to meet the director.”

  I paused and glanced around, concerned that my supervisor would overhear me on the phone. “Listen,” I said, “I don’t know anything about making no movie. And I’m not going any place to make a fool of myself.” Click. I’d been to see one film during my lifetime, and as you know, the experience scared the spit out of me. A movie? No way was I going to get involved with the film business.

  But God clearly saw it another way—and he sent Ms. Smith to deliver his opposing viewpoint. The next morning she called me again, begging me to reconsider. “Why don’t you just go over and meet the director?” she kept saying. I declined. Finally, after she rang me three days in a row, I almost burst a blood vessel.

  “Look, do me a favor,” I said, trying and failing to whisper. “You’re going to make me lose my job. Please . . . don’t call me anymore.”

  “Then tell me that you’ll go see this man after you get off work today,” she urged.

  “Yes, yes, yes!” I said, rushing her off the phone. Just as I was about to click down the receiver, she said, “But wait—you don’t know where I’m sending you!”

  “Well then you’d better talk fast,” I told her. She gave me the address, an office down in Carnegie Hall. The director’s name was Warren Coleman.

  I wasn’t at all nervous to meet Mr. Coleman—whom I eventually came to call Warren. I had no expectations and therefore no stakes, other than to get Ms. Smith off my back. I sat there, relaxed as could be, while Warren, with his velvety-smooth voice and easy smile, led me on a tour of his professional ascent. As one of theater’s most gifted operatic baritones, Warren had created and played the roles of Crown in Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and John Kumalo in Kurt Weill’s Lost in the Stars. He became a Broadway fixture throughout the 1930s and 1940s, which was long enough for him to recognize how Black artists were mistreated, how our creative brilliance was overshadowed by our social rank, how the same white audience members who applauded Black performers publicly wouldn’t allow them to scoot up to their private dinner tables. Those realities had prompted him to form his own production company and create films reflecting African-American life, in all of its resplendent intricacy. He was just beginning work on his first independent movie, The Spectrum, a film about color consciousness in the Black community.

  As he spoke, I feigned interest, nodding at the appropriate junctures, the whole time thinking: This is nonsense. I am not going to be any actress.

  “How much do you know about acting?” Warren asked me.

  “Nothing at all,” I said.

  “Well I have the script of the film right here,” he said. He rummaged through a stack of papers and notebooks on his desk and handed me a spiral-bound book. “Why don’t you take this home and read it?”

  I flipped through it, just to be polite. “I’ve never done anything like this, sir,” I told him. “I just don’t think I’m the right one—but I appreciate your time.” I then sat the book on the desk, picked up my pocketbook, and walked toward the door.

  “No wait a minute . . . wait,” he said, retrieving the script and following me toward the entrance. “I really want you to take this script with you. Can you just read it and see what you think? Will you do that?”

  I looked back at him. “I suppose,” I said, thinking, What harm could come of it? “I guess I could have a look.”

  “Excellent,” he said, giving me the book. “I’ll give you a call in a couple weeks.”

  I carried the script home and tossed it into my bedside drawer. I prefer my humiliation private, thank you very much, and as ambitious as I was to earn money, I had no interest in making a public spectacle of myself. I promptly forgot about the script until, a couple of days later when I was searching in that drawer for a hairbrush, my eyes fell on the book’s cover. I pulled it out and read the first page. An hour later, I was still reading.

  The story gripped me. Autumn, the female lead and a blossoming writer, came to New York with aspiration in her eyes, hoping to sell an article she’d penned. She was my dark complexion. The magazine editor she approached was light-skinned, as was the man she eventually fell in love with. The two began a courtship, and the man’s mother, determined that her son maintain the privilege of their honey-tinged heritage, protested mightily. “If you marry her,” she warned him, “you’ll destroy your career.” I found the plot captivating, yet I still could not see myself in it, especially as the lead. If Warren succeeded in making the film, I told myself, I’d be the first to line up at the cinema to see who played in it and what this whole acting thing was about. And yet, much as I had no vision of myself as Autumn, my curiosity had been awakened—another shoulder tap, another whisper from on high.

  At two weeks to the day, Warren rang me. “I’d like you to come to the studio and meet someone,” he said. I agreed. When I arrived, he introduced me to an actor by the name of Hal DeWindt, who was to play the male lead in The Spectrum.

  “So what did you think of the script?” Warren asked me with hope in his voice.

  “I think it’s great reading,” I said, chuckling. “I enjoyed the story very much.”

  “Good,” he said. He looked over at Hal, and then back at me. “I’d like the two of you to read a scene together,” he said. “Cicely, you read Autumn, and Hal will read his part.” I paused, slowly reached into my bag, and pulled out the script.

  The reading flowed seamlessly. Our voices fit together naturally, weaving and swaying in step, as if we’d been rehearsing with one another for weeks. Magic operates as such. When a pivot is predestined on the stone tablet of your life story, there is often an inexplicable ease to it. It feels otherworldly, from an Almighty source beyond your frail humanity. That is how reading that scene felt to me—supernatural. When I completed my final lines and looked up, Warren was staring at me and grinning.

  “So do you want to be an actress, Cicely?” he said. “Seems to me you already are.”

  I lowered the script and looked down at the floor, giving doubt a chance to resurface. “I don’t know anything about making a movie,” I told him.

  “Well,” he said, l
aughing and sidestepping my reluctance, “I guess you’ll find out.”

  Warren asked whether he could call me again. The part of my spirit that understood the moment’s transcendence, the power of the precipice I was dancing along, agreed. Even when we humans are busy shaking our heads no, shoving down our fears and shoving off our blessings, the Father has a way of propelling us forward, of moving us toward his way. Warren indeed called and pleaded with me to play Autumn, only to be met with another round of my misgivings. And just as Ms. Smith had, he called a second time, refusing to be shunned. By his third call, I’d finally aligned my will with the Father’s. I told Warren yes. And he not only persuaded me to play the role; he insisted that he manage me.

  “How old are you?” he asked me early on.

  “Thirty,” I told him.

  He gazed at me incredulously. “Really?” he said. I nodded.

  “Well you certainly don’t look it,” he said. “You could pass for ten years younger, my dear, and from now on, you should claim to be.” Nature has bestowed Black people with one of its most prized gifts, melanin, and in a society where we are seldom allowed an advantage, Warren understood the importance of utilizing mine. Six decades would go by before I let the public in on what was frankly never any of their business.