by Cicely Tyson
I later heard that George Cukor—who had been the original director of Gone with the Wind, until he was replaced—had wanted to turn The Blue Bird into his Gone with the Wind. That approach obviously did not work, as the film was critically skewered upon release. And incidentally, I also heard that the movie’s soundman had been madly in love with Liz Taylor. During filming, so went the grapevine chatter, the man wandered by Liz’s dressing room to give her something. When she opened the door, she was wearing an old frock, like a frumpy housewife, and her hair was all over the place. She wasn’t the Liz Taylor of his fantasy, but a mortal just like the rest of us. From that day forward, it seems like everything with the production went south.
Still, there was one bright spot: I got on well with Jane Fonda. She knew I’d lost my mother, and when I arrived in Moscow, she embraced me. “Do you know how worried we were about you?” she said. I will always remember her kindness. On set and off, we talked constantly, and she was as passionate about her causes then as she is now. Through the early 1970s she had been protesting against the Vietnam War, a move that made some people question her patriotism. She is, at her core, a fighter, and a Sagittarian like me. In the United States, protest is our birthright, but when you exercise that right, you are often penalized for it. Jane, by then, had discovered that. I didn’t spend much time off set with Ava Gardner or Liz Taylor, who was then Hollywood’s darling. My dustup with Liz would come years later on a different project.
Liz and I both took our pets with us to Moscow. She had two dogs (I don’t recall what breeds), while I had my Lhasa apso called Stuff, for no reason in particular other than that I liked that name. I’d spotted Stuff on the same day I left for Moscow. From the moment I saw his little nose pressed up against the storefront glass window, I was smitten. In Moscow, Liz turned her dogs over to the caretaker of the property at which we stayed, whereas I let Susan, the assistant traveling with me, care for Stuff. While we were on set working during eighteen-hour days, the caretaker fell in love with Liz’s dogs. Near the end of filming, Liz said to me, “I don’t have the heart to ask him for them back,” and she indeed left them in Russia. I brought Stuff home with me during what turned out to be a thunderbolt of an exit.
George had asked the crew to stay on a while longer to reshoot some scenes that his Russian-speaking crew had failed to capture. I refused. Our film dates, outlined in my contract, had already come and gone, and I was eager to get back to my life in the United States. A contract is a contract. Also, Moscow isn’t exactly the tropics, and after weeks layered in every piece of clothing I’d packed, I was frozen. And then there was the bland Russian cuisine, which did little for my West Indian taste buds. I was cold. I was hungry. I was grieving my mother. Plus, I’d already committed to do another movie back in Los Angeles. Filming was to start shortly.
I asked my assistant, Susan, to arrange for my departure. No flights out of Leningrad were immediately available, so she booked me on a train from Leningrad to Zurich, and from there—after a tussle with airport officials, who tried to ban me from traveling with my dog—I flew on to Los Angeles. I told no one in the crew I was leaving. Somehow or another, while I was en route home, word got around to Frank Sinatra that Russia was giving me a hard time crossing its borders with a pet. Frank and I go way back, to the days when we both played in the 1966 film A Man Called Adam. Frank called my agent, Haber, and said, “I hear they won’t let Cicely Tyson out of Russia. Can I help?” What a gracious offer. But by then, child, I’d already made my own way back to the offices of 20th Century Fox (the distributor of The Blue Bird) before anyone on George Cukor’s crew even knew I was gone.
While I was at the studio, one of the execs picked up the phone to call George in Russia. “Do you know where Cicely Tyson is?” the exec asked. “She’s in her suite,” George answered. “No, she isn’t,” the studio head said, laughing. “She’s sitting here at my desk in Beverly Hills.” Around the business, I have sometimes been called difficult. The truth is that I insist upon respect. I don’t take any tea for the fever, child. Even now, at age ninety-six, I teach folks not to mess with me.
* * *
The year after my mother went home to heaven, Miles went missing here on earth. By then he’d taken a hiatus from music, and as he put down his horn, he picked up his drug habit again. Word around town was that he’d sunk to his lowest. I’d gotten to know Miles’s eldest daughter, Cheryl, during the years when Miles and I were first together. In 1975, with desperation in her voice, she called me.
“We can’t find Father,” she said, referring to Miles as she and her siblings always did. I pressed the phone closer to my ear. “What do you mean you can’t find him, Cheryl?” I asked. “Nobody has seen or heard from him,” she replied. He’d gone out to San Francisco weeks earlier, she told me, but since then, neither his housekeeper, Burlina, nor anyone else in his family had gotten a call. In California, Miles had been staying with a couple he knew well, the same friends who’d breathed life back into him years earlier when he’d overdosed. They were the ones who told her he was missing. “Well I have no idea where he is,” I told her. Though I hadn’t seen Miles since the day he’d stumbled into my hotel suite stoned, and though we’d certainly had our moments of strife, I of course still regarded him as a friend. And as a friend, I was concerned.
I knew the couple that Miles had stayed with and called them myself. I wish to God I could recall their names, but time has dimmed that from memory. The wife answered when I rang. When they hadn’t heard from Miles for a couple of days, her husband had put out the word around town, even asking about him in the dope houses Miles frequented. “We’ve talked to everybody we know,” she told me. “We’ve gone every place that he hangs out, even asked about him among the dealers. Nobody has seen him.”
Over the next week, I checked in with both the woman and Cheryl. “Any luck?” I’d ask. “Dead or alive?” No word. Finally, the following week, a dealer spotted Miles in a street gutter. His face was covered in spit and vomit, his eyes glued shut. He was unconscious, in a drug coma. The man leaned over, took Miles’s pulse, and once he realized he was still alive, he called the couple. The husband arrived a short time later, and to avoid unfavorable press attention, he decided against taking Miles to the hospital. Instead, he and the dealer hoisted Miles’s limp body into the back seat of the car. He then drove him to his home and called Cheryl, who called me. “We found him,” she told me, relief in her voice. “And he’s alive.”
Barely. The couple did everything they could think of to nurse Miles back to consciousness—including putting cold compresses on his face every hour as he lay in bed—but he would not wake up. The wife called me daily with updates. “He’s breathing,” she said, “but he’s still unconscious.” Finally, on the third day, Miles cracked open his lids and stared blankly at her, as if she were a stranger. To spark his memory, she played some of his records and began talking to him about his children, his music, his life in New York. That did the trick. When she mentioned his daughter, Cheryl, Miles lifted his hand toward hers, as if the world had leapt into color. The woman took Miles’s hand, cold as clay, and would not let go. Though his eyes were open, he did not speak.
That evening, the husband sat Miles up on the side of his bed. Miles then tried to stand, but as he did, his legs buckled and he collapsed. The couple, each on one side of Miles, lifted him up and led him to the bathroom. “Let’s take him to the shower,” the husband said, hoping some cool water would hasten his recovery. Miles sat on the tub’s edge, looking down at his feet and up at the shower head as a waterfall descended. They dried him off, put him in some pajamas, and helped him back into bed. He was still mute.
That dear couple hovered over Miles as he alternated between the chills, sweats, and nausea brought on by his drug withdrawal. Finally, after three weeks, he was strong enough to fly home to New York. When the couple told him how worried I’d been, he began weeping. Cheryl called me with the news of Miles’s recovery and travel pl
ans, saying that when she talked to him, he sounded like himself. Miles and I never spoke directly at that time. Frankly, there was little to say. My concern from afar, an act of friendship born purely of my care for him, had spoken clearly enough.
18
Roots
EVERYWHERE in the world I go, folks still come up to me, palms over their hearts, and whisper, “Roots.” Though I’ve played more than a hundred roles in my time, many of which have fallen from memory, millions will forever know me as Binta, mother of Kunta Kinte, the Gambian man at the center of Alex Haley’s epic saga Roots. Over eight nights in the winter of 1977, the nation sat in rapt attention as the story of Haley’s ancestry, starting with Kinte’s birth and winding its way through two continents and seven generations, unfolded on their televisions. It’s a testament to God’s handiwork that Roots came to include my portrayal.
A couple of years earlier, when Jane Pittman was complete, I went away to Rancho La Puerta, Mexico, for a two-week vacation. Near the end of it, my agent, Haber, called me. “Hurry up and get back here,” he said. “I’ve got some big things going for you.” Soon as I arrived at his place, he gave me a copy of The Ledger, a crime-thriller novel by Dorothy Uhnak, and told me to read it. The book’s main character, Christie Opara, works as an undercover detective—a white New York City policewoman who prances through town, half-naked with her skirt up to her crotch, as a decoy to ensnare criminals. ABC had adapted the story for the small screen in a series to be called Get Christie Love!, featuring a Black female lead. ABC had me in mind to play Christie, Haber explained. The more I read, the lower my heart sank. He must be crazy if he thinks I’m taking part in this foolishness, I thought. Surely there had to be a mistake.
The next day, I called Haber at his office. “Are you sure you gave me the right book?” I asked him. “Yes,” he said. “What’s the matter?” I paused. “I know you don’t expect me to do this,” I told him. “And if you do,” I continued, “I am telling you right now, I will not.” It’s interesting that when the network heads adapted the novel to the screen, they reimagined it with a Black woman as basically a prostitute—a narrative in line with the many featured in the Blaxploitation films of that era, not to mention a reinforcement of the very stereotype I’d been attempting, with my choice of roles, to counter. That wasn’t the surprise. The real stunner was that they thought that I—on the heels of having earned every accolade imaginable for portraying the dignified Jane Pittman—would even consider such a role. Between that and the ignorance I’d witnessed while traveling this country to address outright bigotry against Black people, no way was I about to strip down to play a hooker with a badge. “All right,” Haber said. “Let’s meet and talk.” I had little more to say.
That evening when he arrived at the house, I repeated my misgivings. “Are you sure you won’t even consider it?” he said. I nodded and his eyes filled with tears. And in that moment, I said to myself, Oh boy, he’s in trouble. It occurred to me that he’d already agreed that I would do the role. He did not admit that, nor did he have to. His expression gave it away. As he lowered his gaze to the floor, I knew the truth: if I did not show up on set the following week, his job could be in jeopardy, which is why I relented. “I’ll meet with the producers and maybe do just one episode,” I told him, “but they’ll need to find someone to replace me.” The color returned to his face as he thanked me profusely.
The day before I was to show up at ABC, a fungus developed under the big toenail of my left foot. “Take some olive oil, heat it up, and soak your foot in it,” a friend told me. “That’ll pull the infection right out.” I unearthed my glass electric kettle, filled it with water and a touch of oil, and plugged it in. Moments later from the living room, I heard the kettle boiling and rushed to the kitchen to unplug it. I then wrapped a cold wet rag around the glass canister to cool it off. That’s when the glass cracked into pieces and shattered onto my foot, along with a flood of scalding water.
I crawled to the phone and called Haber, who rang for an ambulance. Doctors later confirmed what my foot, red and throbbing, had already told me: I’d suffered third-degree burns. The nurses wrapped my foot tightly, urged me to stay off of it for at least three weeks, and sent me home on crutches. “Call ABC and tell them I won’t be there,” I said to Haber. To this day, he swears I burned myself deliberately, just to get out of the role. “Now I know how serious you are about your work,” he told me. Truth is, though it had been an accident, I was relieved. Because the closer I got to the first day of playing a role that turned my stomach, the more conflicted I felt. This is God’s work, I thought, and I’m not going to question it.
As I limped my way through the next few weeks, the producers began auditioning potential replacements. They eventually discovered one in Teresa Graves, the actress who’d played in the long-running TV sketch comedy Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. David Wolper, whose production company produced the series, called me. “We found someone, Ms. Tyson,” he said, chuckling, “but you owe me one.” Months later he also said to me, “You were right not to do Christie Love.” As it turned out, that girl was so unhappy in that role that she eventually left the business and became a Jehovah’s Witness. Years later, she tragically died in a house fire.
Two years later, in 1976, that same producer, David Wolper, called me again. “I have a role for you,” he said. His production company, he explained, had just started work on the TV miniseries Roots. “And remember,” he said, laughing, “you owe me one.” I smirked. “Well I’m not going to do it for nothing,” I told him. Like Alfre, I was tired of studios paying me pennies, only to turn around and make a mint. “Of course not,” he said. “I’ll call your agent and we’ll discuss it.” One week later, for a sum more respectable than any I’d ever earned up to then, I signed on to play Binta, mother of Kunta Kinte, in a film that would shake the nation to its core.
* * *
The book preceded the miniseries, but only by a few months. In the fall of 1976 before the film aired in January 1977, Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family debuted to critical and commercial fanfare, ultimately spending forty-six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list (twenty-two of them at number one) and earning Haley a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award special citation. The book went on to sell six million copies. But what appeared to be an overnight success had actually spanned more than a decade. Haley, who’d merited acclaim for his 1965 collaboration The Autobiography of Malcolm X, became curious about his own ancestry. In his family’s rich oral tradition, Haley’s grandmother had passed along stories of their ancestor Kunta Kinte—a young Muslim man who’d been enslaved during his teen years and shipped to America during the treacherous four-month-long Middle Passage. Family lore told that Kinte obstinately refused to trade his given name for Toby, the one forced upon him by his new masters. Haley followed that trail to the shores of West Africa, where, armed only with this oral history and the name Kunta Kinte (portrayed, in his younger years in the film, by LeVar Burton), he began tracing his family’s lineage with the help of a Gambian griot, or storyteller. That search, over twelve long years, gave birth to Roots.
I met Alex Haley soon after his book had been published. As his story gripped readers around the nation and world, he began hosting forums, town hall gatherings much like those I’d participated in after the release of Sounder. I took part in a few of his forums, which is how he and I first became acquainted. I adored him from the first meeting, when our rich conversations weaved and bobbed through the story of how his book came to be. When I find someone who stimulates me intellectually, as he did, that person can never get rid of me. What an extraordinary human being Alex Haley was, both soft-spoken and humble. Over the years of our friendship—and these days, I can hardly recall a time when he wasn’t in my life—he rarely raised his voice above a whisper. Few would have guessed that the gale winds unleashed by Malcolm X and Roots flowed from such an even-tempered soul. Like many talented artists, he let his pen do his pick
eting.
God began preparing me for Roots years before the series was even a thought. I had traveled to Africa for the first time in 1967, to the Kingdom of Dahomey, tucked between Togo and Nigeria in present-day Benin. My work on The Comedians, a film costarring Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, is what took me there. The story was set in Haiti, but because of political conflict there, the film was shot in Dahomey. The movie was a forgettable flop, but the vivid colors, aromas, and sounds of Africa still dance in my memory. Away from filming, I traveled the country with a translator, talking to women who gathered at the shoreline to wash their clothes, witnessing the rich community and uproarious laughter around supper tables, relishing the vibrant flavors of maize, yams, and peanut stew served from their wooden tables. I did not speak their language, but I knew these women. The abiding care that knits together the African-American community, that profound intuitiveness and palpable spirituality that has always been within us—it is present in Mother Africa. In truth, it originated there.
I was studying and didn’t know it. The Dahomean women wore their bushels of hair in elaborate braided styles, each parted to perfection and often signaling their tribal affiliations. The Bantu knots I donned in Roots are like those I spotted during my travels (and on set with my hairdresser, Omar, I insisted the style be precisely replicated). So much of great acting is about paying attention to the passing world, and every morning while in Africa, I homed in on the details of their grooming habits. The people there never used soap and water on their skin. Rather, they washed their faces with the juice they’d squeezed from leaves. I don’t know what was in those leaves, but I hardly ever saw anyone with a pimple. At sunup before the women began their daily work, they’d clean their teeth using bark they’d stripped from a tree—and by the way, they had perfect teeth. When I returned home to New York and walked along 125th Street in Harlem, I chuckled when I spotted African immigrants, street salesmen, doing the same thing: sitting on boxes alongside their wares, using a piece of bark as a homemade toothbrush. Like a great many traditions our ancestors brought to America, they carried that practice with them. I brought those memories with me onto the set of Roots.
