by Cicely Tyson
When Miles was on coke or heroin, he did not frighten me. Frankly, even when he abstained he could be crazy as a loon, and he didn’t scare me then either. But the one time he did truly unnerve me, he happened to be sober as a judge. The rampage was fueled by his major jealous streak, if it can even be called a streak. That man was envious to the bone. His possessiveness was born of his feeling, deep down, that he was not enough. Not for me. Not for music. Not for himself. When you don’t know your true value, you see the world through the lens of how you don’t measure up. He was intent on marking his territory, and if he suspected anyone was infringing upon it, he exploded.
Around 1983, I’d traveled to Africa to do a movie with Liz Taylor, sometime before our legal dustup. I don’t recall the country or film, but I’ll never forget what transpired. While we were away, Liz had won an award in the States and couldn’t be there to accept it. Marlon Brando, her costar in the 1967 film Reflections in a Golden Eye, had received the award on her behalf. He then flew to the Motherland to personally deliver the award to her. He arranged a dinner gathering for Liz and our film crew, in celebration of her honor. I knew to keep my distance. Marlon and I had met around the business many times, and he had a reputation and a half with women. I wanted no part of his womanizing. I can usually tell when trouble is afoot, and in this case, I was spot on.
In advance of the dinner, I let both Marlon and Liz know I would not be in attendance. On the evening of the event, I returned to my hotel after a tiring day on set and began preparing for sleep. As soon as I got under the covers, the phone rang. “Ms. Tyson, Marlon Brando is in the lobby for you,” said the attendant. “He says he’s here to pick you up for the dinner.”
I paused. “Please tell him that I sent a message that I was not coming to dinner and I’m already in bed.”
She placed me on hold and returned a moment later. “He says he’d like to come upstairs to your room.”
I sat up in bed and mustered my most stern voice. “Please do not allow him up here, okay?” I said. “I did not invite him here. Please ask him to leave.” I can only guess what Marlon had in mind when he tried to push his way up to my room. I turned over, tried to forget it, and drifted off to sleep.
The next day, Marlon came to our film set. He spotted me from behind, before I saw him, and he came up alongside me and put his arms around my waist. “I’m sorry I disturbed you last evening,” he said. “I hadn’t received your earlier message.” Both of us knew that wasn’t the case, but we laughed it off and moved on. I explained how exhausted I’d been, apologized for missing the festivities, and thought that was the end of it. How wrong I was.
A couple of months after I’d returned to New York, I opened my mail to find a photo of me with Marlon, his arms around me. Someone on the crew had apparently snapped a photograph of us on set that day. Just as I was studying the photo, Miles walked into our bedroom. “What’s that?” he asked. It did not occur to me to hide the picture because I had nothing to hide. Before I could answer, he glanced over my shoulder and saw Marlon hugging me. Miles went absolutely berserk, flailing his arms, shouting obscenities, calling Marlon everything but a child of God. “Give me that!” he said, snatching the picture from my grip. He then ripped it into tiny shreds, the jagged pieces scattering across the hardwood floor.
Fear rippled through me. A half-second later, boy, I bolted from that bedroom, jumped down a whole flight of steps, charged out of his brownstone, ran to the apartment I still had around the corner, locked my door, and yanked down all the shades. A woman should always have a place of her own, some independence, and I’d held on to mine, in part, to keep a canyon between me and Miles’s rants. He predictably followed me soon after, raising Cain the whole way there. I could hear him through my windows, pleading with me to let him in, cursing Marlon to hell. I just lay on my bed and cried until he left my stoop, which he eventually did after wearing himself out. If I had let him in, I don’t know what might have happened. Yet I did know that Miles’s rage, reminiscent of the fury I’d often witnessed in my father, had unleashed a fear in me I hadn’t known was there. I didn’t even get up and prepare myself for bed that evening. I just lay there fully clothed, my face in my pillow, my thoughts on my mother and that mystical wedding band.
20
Threadbare
RELATIONSHIPS are knitted together by need. When two people connect, the purpose each is serving in the other’s life is what holds the union in place, keeps the ragged edges of its hemline sewn. My need to nurse Miles back to health fit perfectly with his need to be nurtured, and for the first few years of our reunion, that dynamic bound us tightly. But as Miles outgrew the desire for a caretaker, and as I became less tolerant of what ailed him, our marriage began unraveling. The loose thread, the one strand threatening to pull apart our entire union, appeared in the summer of 1984.
Long before then, there were signs of fraying. After the Marlon Brando incident came other jealous tirades. One evening when Miles and I attended the opening of one of my films, he spotted playwright Chuck Gordone, author of No Place to Be Somebody and the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, talking to me. Miles stormed over and inserted himself between us. “What are you doing in her face, man!?” he shouted, forcefully enough to shower Chuck’s nose. “Miles, Miles,” I said pulling him away. “It’s all right. We’re just talking.” There I was, dressed to the nines in my sequin gown, and I wasn’t about to let Miles ruin my celebration. He seemed convinced that all men were attempting to steal his wife, which reflected not their intentions, but his. Miles’s roving eye was proof, in his mind, of everyone else’s. Anybody who knows me can tell you that I did not sniff around while I was with Miles, was never even open to others’ advances. But Miles wanted to own me. You always seek to control others when you are not in full ownership of yourself.
Other peculiar behavior abounded, particularly when Miles had been using. One afternoon, I spotted him through the front window of his townhouse, strutting toward the front door. Once we married, we lived between his place and mine on the other side of town, an apartment I purchased on the Upper East Side right along Central Park. Now Miles, even if he had his keys in his hand, always rang the doorbell at his place. For whatever reason, he wanted me to come down from upstairs and open the door for him. Yet on this day he entered on his own and left the door ajar. I glanced at his glazed eyes and said to myself, Uh-oh, he’s under. That’s when I took my little whiny behind, as my mom would’ve called it, and lay down on the couch. I knew not to fool with him when he was high.
I heard him fumbling around in the kitchen for something. He emerged holding three butcher knives. He then scooted a dining room chair near the open front door. While clutching the knives, he sat in that chair for the longest time, like he was waiting for Godot. I tell you, God has taken care of me in this life. I’d never seen anyone behave in such a manner, but I was not frightened, nor did I move. I just lay there taking in the scene, wondering who in the world he thought was coming through that door. Neither of us spoke. I studied Miles’s face: the same eyes, same nose, same mouth, same velvety smooth skin and sculpted cheekbones. But those drugs, as they often did, had turned him into a stranger. He sat there so long that the sun went down, and I nodded off. Hours later, I awakened to the sound of his slamming the front door. I guess he decided whomever he was waiting on wasn’t ever showing up. Strange.
Another knife incident ended differently. Miles was preparing to host a couple he knew from the business. Before their arrival, I stole away to the kitchen to prepare hors d’oeuvres. At some point he came in there and said something salty to me—I cannot recall what. Moments later, I picked up a serving tray holding our silverware, and as I carried it across the room, a knife toppled to the floor. Fire filled his eyes as he lunged toward me and punched me in my chest. “Oh, you have a temper, do you?” he shouted. I dropped the tray and folded my arms around my upper body. “What is the matter with you?” I squealed. He thought I�
��d thrown down the knife in anger, as a response to his comment, and he interpreted that as an act of defiance, a push-back on his authority. When I explained, through tears, that the knife had fallen by mistake, Miles pulled me into his arms and squeezed me. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “Please forgive me, Cic.” I’d of course heard that Miles had laid his hands on Frances and Betty, his first two wives, but up to then, he hadn’t raised his fist to me. That incident marked the first and last time Miles ever struck me.
And then there were the women. Miles kept his extramarital exploits mostly out of my sight, yet they were never invisible to my third eye. I always knew when Miles was stepping out on our marriage, just as my mother had known of my dad’s unfaithfulness. I didn’t need to be in the room to sense that it was occurring. Occasionally, evidence of his infidelity presented itself under the noonday sun, like it had in our first years together when Betty had shown up at his door. Once when I confronted Miles about his womanizing, he had the gumption to say to me, “I wish you’d go out and see somebody.” If I lifted my skirt around town, Miles reasoned, he’d feel less guilty about his sexual adventures. I did not respond, not with words anyway. As irrefutable proof of his affairs mounted, I pulled away physically. And on the occasions when we were intimate, I insisted on his using protection. We both knew why.
It is astonishing, even to me, that I did not walk away from Miles at that juncture. In one sense, I pitied him even more than I loved him. How can you be angry at a man so broken, so intent on destroying himself? In another sense, I scorned him, resented that he was doing to me exactly what my own father had done to my mom, that he was brazenly betraying our vows. I was reliving my mother’s story, a plotline I realize now that I’d unwittingly set up. When Miles and I had reconnected after years apart, I knew exactly who this man was. He’d demonstrated that during our first time together, and it stood to reason that his behaviors would continue as they did, especially once he’d gotten off his crutches and back on his trumpet.
Love, however, is often not born of logic. It is birthed by need. Our dysfunctional histories drew Miles and me powerfully toward one another in ways inexplicable to us. Rage attracts rage. And though my fury, at times, manifested as brooding hostility in contrast to Miles’s blazing inferno, our marriage, for both of us, was about coming to terms with the extraordinary ache of our early years, that impressionable time when life pressed its thumbprints into our flesh. Our union was God’s spiritual assignment to us, an opportunity to treat severe wounds that had festered for decades. Neither of us knew how to complete that homework. And as far as I was concerned, my relationship with Miles was not a lesson to be heeded, but a mission to be accomplished. God had put me here to save this man’s life, a task I intended to carry out. That is how I saw it then. And that is why I remained at his side for as long as I did.
When Miles cheated, he resumed the cycle he’d set up during our first go-round. I knew when he’d either snorted drugs or hooked up with some woman, because, as before, he’d come bounding home with diamonds, racks of clothes, and enough flowers to host a funeral, as if those items would somehow erase the damage he’d done to me emotionally and spiritually. Nothing whips anybody’s tail like guilt. In place of gifts, I longed for him to respect the promises we’d made. On some evenings when he came in late after being out in the clubs with women, he’d slip through the front door and tiptoe to our bathroom, wiping off the lipstick on his mouth and neck. He’d then shower, put on his bedclothes, and sidle up next to me in bed. I’d lie there saying to myself, Does this man think I’m stupid? Doesn’t he know I’m aware of his behavior? As he pulled me toward him, I’d pretend to be asleep while fuming inwardly.
The thread that began unspooling our union came just after a lovely spring had given way to summer’s first heat. I’d traveled out West to work on a project, and Miles, who was preparing to go on tour, had stayed at the Upper East Side apartment in New York. Though Miles still had his Upper West Side brownstone and I of course had my first apartment around the corner on Seventy-Fourth, we mostly lived between my place on Fifth Avenue and the Malibu Beach house. Just as I was settling in at the beach house, my maid, an elderly Jamaican woman by the name of Jean, called me.
“You know, Ms. Tyson,” Jean said, “this is really none of my business . . .” My throat tightened.
“What’s none of your business?” I asked.
“Uh, well,” she stammered, “I mean . . . I just don’t think what Miles is doing is proper.”
“Proper? What are you talking about?”
“Well,” she went on, “there’s a lady who lives in your building. She’s married and she has a son. But the minute you leave here to go out of town, she is in this apartment with Miles.”
I clutched the phone and pressed it into my ear. “What lady are you talking about?” I asked calmly, though Hades raged within me.
She described someone I’d seen, a white woman with a thick mane of curls sprawled all over her head. I hadn’t ever spoken to her, but her husband often smiled and nodded when he saw me.
“Do you mean the woman with the bushy hair?” I pressed.
“Yes,” she said. “She comes up here to your place, and sometimes he goes down to hers.”
There was more. Every morning at around ten o’clock, revealed Jean, Miles and this woman would meet up right in front of the building and head off for a brief stroll along Madison Avenue. They’d then circle back around to the building, which overlooked Central Park. My maid, the elevator operator, the doorman: all three had been whispering about the liaison, stunned that Miles would risk being seen with another woman in and around my apartment. I thanked my housekeeper, hung up the phone, and booked a flight back to New York.
I planned to arrive at the building at 10 a.m., just as Miles would be exiting to meet this woman for their walk. He froze when he saw me.
“What are you doing back already?” he asked, drawing me toward him for a hug.
I grinned. “The project was postponed,” I said breezily. He turned to go back into the building, but I said, “Come on, let’s go for a walk. I feel like stretching my legs after the flight.”
I gave the doorman my bags, and Miles and I set out on the route he and the woman had apparently often taken, over to Madison Avenue and then back around onto Central Park East. When we returned fifteen minutes later, there she stood, out in front of the building, I’m sure looking for Miles and wondering why he hadn’t met her. You should have seen her face when she spotted the two of us walk up. She and Miles glanced at one another, clearly not wanting me to recognize the exclamation points in their eyes as they exchanged looks. I acted as if I did not notice, just as I’d feigned ignorance all those times when Miles slid into bed after wiping off fresh lipstick. My performance should’ve earned me an Oscar. Miles looked at her, she looked away, and Miles and I strode right past her and into the building. Once upstairs in our apartment, I didn’t say a word to Miles about what the maid had revealed. I hoped, perhaps foolishly in retrospect, that my unexpected return home would be enough to put their tryst on ice. It wasn’t.
Miles kept right on messing with this woman when I traveled, and the maid kept right on divulging the details. I was as crushed as I was flabbergasted. The two had the nerve to be hooking up in my bed, on my sheets, in an apartment that my decades of toil in this business had bought and paid for. And they didn’t even have the decency or discretion to keep it hidden from my maid and the building’s employees. My housekeeper had heard their grunts and screams from behind the bedroom door.
After seething privately for a time, I broached the subject with Miles in a doozy of an argument that shook Fifth Avenue. He predictably denied the affair, claiming that he and this woman were merely professional acquaintances. The maid had misunderstood, he told me. According to Miles, this woman, an artist and sculptor, had been teaching him to paint. Months earlier, Miles had been doodling all over the place. When I’d noticed him sketching directly onto our fu
rniture, I’d gone down to Lee’s Art Shop on Fifty-Seventh Street, near Carnegie Hall, and bought him paper and tools. Apparently, he’d turned to this woman for some tutoring. And yet based on the claw marks I noticed on Miles’s back and stomach, she was teaching him a lot more than how to wield a paintbrush. During the fracas, I threatened to divorce Miles, and he pleaded for me to stay. Then in typical fashion, over the next few days he presented me with a diamond brooch and another mink coat.
Not long after my brawl with Miles, I spotted the bushy-haired woman as I was entering the building. She was sitting on a couch in the lobby, dressed as if she were about to go out for a jog. She looked me in the eye, pursed her lips, and smiled.
“What are you smiling at me for?” I snapped.
She sat back on the bench and exhaled. “Oh, I’m just being nice,” she said. “People smile.”
Let me tell you something about myself. If this white woman hadn’t dared to grin in my direction, I likely would’ve stepped right on past her and gone up quietly in the elevator. I’d done exactly that several times before then. But the fact that she had the audacity not only to look me in my Black face and smile, but also to answer flippantly, disturbed me beyond measure. Please don’t do that, I said to myself. Please stop acting like I don’t know you’re sleeping with my husband.
