by Cicely Tyson
By the time I agreed to portray Autumn, filming had paused. Warren was leaving shoe tracks all over Manhattan, trying to raise the necessary capital to complete the production. That didn’t stop Hal and me. We began rehearsing during my lunch breaks, as well as any time I could wedge a session into the cracks of my packed schedule. As we practiced our scenes, gone was the apprehension I’d felt about acting, and in its place was the passion that had powered my rise as a model. I may initially waver before lunging toward a new experience, but once I do, I grow unrelenting. I rehearsed my lines with the frenzy of a capsized sailor, gasping for air, desperate to stay afloat. And even while Hal and I worked, Warren began sending me out on small auditions. I mostly floundered, but that didn’t matter because at least I was in the room. One failed audition at a time, I was learning the business, dipping my toe in its frigid waters.
It was Warren who introduced me to the flurry and bustle of New York theater and, in many ways, to life beyond the walls of the church world I’d been reared in. Given his long-standing success on Broadway, he had access, which he leveraged to offer me a crash course in both craft and sophistication. I became fast friends with the affable Diana Sands, another young actress in The Spectrum, and Warren whisked us from one play and concert to the next, where we met performers backstage, soaking in the chaos and the costumes and the color of their behind-the-curtain artistry and antics. Afterward, he exposed us to some of the city’s finest cuisines (in the rice-and-plantains existence of my youth, escargot had absolutely no place). Into the wee hours of the morning over such purported delicacies, we’d talk scripting and technique and plot. I had no idea what I was gibbering about, of course, but Warren insisted I had potential. “You’ve got natural talent,” he assured me. I’d smile and think, What does that even mean? A raw slab of marble also has so-called potential, but only when a sculptor chips away at it, piece by piece, does a face emerge. Raw talent does not a fine actor make.
Which is why, even as I zealously rehearsed with Hal, I prioritized my modeling work. Before I knew it, I was earning enough money to finally leave the Red Cross, three decades shy of a gilded watch, and feeling grateful for the stepping-stone that job served for me. From the start, I’d told my mother about my modeling work, and surprisingly, she voiced no objections, especially after she began spotting me in the center spreads of the magazines she read. She soaked it up: she had a famous daughter, child, one with accomplishments worth displaying, one she could now be proud of again after a season of a lowered head. My work qualified not as an ungodly undertaking, but as a point of family and community pride. But the same could not be said of her perspective on my film work, which I hid from her.
One night Warren asked me, “Have you told your mother about the movie?”
I shook my head. “She would not approve,” I said.
“Well maybe I should talk to her,” he offered.
“That’s not a good idea,” I shot back. “I would rather her not know right now.”
My work on The Spectrum was easy to conceal. Mom was used to my coming and going at all times of the day and night, so that did not raise suspicion. But things changed soon after my conversation with Warren.
Late one evening, after Warren and I had seen a mesmerizing production of My Fair Lady at the Mark Hellinger Theater, he walked me home. My mother happened to be sitting at her window, looking down and watching the world go by, like the old folks often do. She spotted Warren and me. When I got upstairs to the apartment, the grand inquisition commenced.
“Who was that man you were with?” she asked me.
“He’s a producer, Mom,” I said. “He’s doing a movie, and he would like me to be a part of it.” I stopped short of revealing I’d been rehearsing for months.
“You can’t do that,” she told me.
“Why?” I said.
“You’re going to leave this good job you have for this damn foolishness?” she said, referring to my typing pool and modeling work.
“I didn’t say I was leaving anything,” I retorted. “I just said I was going to go do this movie.”
She stared at me for a long moment. “Well you can’t stay here and do that,” she said. Her statement jarred me so, echoed through me, that I could not even look at her. Without a word, I rose from the couch and disappeared into my bedroom.
There was no sense in arguing with my mother. What she was forbidding me to do I was already headlong into doing, with no intention of reversing course. God himself had pointed my suede pumps in this new direction. I’d come to believe that, even as I was still making sense of the film industry and wondering whether I had any place in it. And while I’d known instinctively this disagreement with my mother had been postponable, I’d also realized it was inevitable. I’d dared to enter the den of iniquity, Lucifer’s workshop as my Mom saw it. Anything to do with entertainment or theater was pure sin, the devil’s territory, an express train to Hades. My apparent transgression, as well as the temerity I’d shown in mentioning it within my mother’s earshot, was grounds enough for her to promptly dismiss me.
The next day, I called Thelma Jack. She was working for the telephone company and had her own place downtown at 112 East Seventh Street. It had two bedrooms. “May I come live with you?” I asked her after explaining my situation. She enthusiastically agreed, eager not only to share her apartment, but also to halve the rent. I’d have my own private space there, one large enough to have Joan with me during her school breaks. Another upside that made Thelma the consummate roommate candidate: she and I wore the same dress size, a 4. That was important to me because, in between rehearsing and modeling, I was still constantly interviewing for clerical temp jobs. When I’d go out on interviews, I could borrow Thelma’s dresses—and borrow I did.
When I left my mother’s apartment, we did not speak for nearly a year. We did not see each other for almost two. As devastated as I was by her choice, as deeply as her words had sliced through me, I knew she’d made the only decision she felt she could. It was her way of loving me, of trying to redirect my steps and shift my affections away from the strivings of this world and back toward the kingdom of heaven. And yet even those who care deeply for us cannot always see our big picture, the Grand Story Line that is destined to unfold before us. They are on their own journeys. And though their paths may run parallel to ours, each is singular in its curves and mileposts, unique in its destination. As much as others want the best for us, they do not necessarily understand God’s best. He alone does.
My liberation from my mother’s rule created in me a newfound fervor. Mom had hoped to douse my burgeoning dream with her condemnation, prayed she could snuff it out with a stinging decree. But she’d inadvertently lit a match beneath me. Up to then, enamored though I was with the notion of acting, I was still secretly grappling with my fears, my uncertainties about whether I’d ever be good enough for the stage. My mother’s disapproval became my liquid fuel, my requisite source of strength. Before she put me out, I’d been attempting to prove to myself that I could excel as an actress. Afterward, her displeasure pushed me, if nothing else, to prove her wrong.
I tell you, boy, God certainly kept me in his sight line. I couldn’t have dreamed up a script more compelling than the one that played out for me during those years. Who just happens to be approached on the street by a total stranger, only to have that man propose modeling, only to have that modeling work become a footbridge to the stage? To some, this might look like happenstance, a sequence of coincidences, a string of disconnected flukes. As I see it, my tide shift, my sharp turnaround, had the Savior’s handprints all over it. His sovereignty was apparent to me. It still is. The same Master who holds the firmaments in the crease of his palms, who commands oceans to recede, who maintains humanity’s entire existence with the mist of his breath—that God, the Source of time itself, the Creator of all life, has forever been directing mine.
10
Center Stage
IT’S NOT every day you find y
ourself seated next to Marilyn Monroe. Such a day arrived for me in 1956, not long after I’d devoted myself to acting.
By then, The Spectrum had become an afterthought. Once Warren’s coffers had run dry halfway through filming, he never could replenish them, even once he’d left skid marks all over Manhattan trying to raise capital. Rather than simmering in that setback, he linked arms with director Harold Young and screenplay writer Charles Gossett for Carib Gold, a maritime movie about a shrimp boat crew that discovers a sunken treasure. Diana Sands, who’d become a dear sister-friend to me, was cast in the film. So was I, though not as the lead. I was to play Dottie, wife of a deckhand. Perhaps strangely to some, I felt relieved not to play the principal role. With my career still in its infancy, my preparation had yet to catch up with my passion. By the time Warren connected with Harold and Charles about the script, the inimitable Ethel Waters, the 1920s blues singer who, by that time, had begun lending her artistic deftness to the stage, had already been tapped as Carib’s headliner.
“Do you even want to be in the film?” Warren had asked me, having observed my periodic vacillations between euphoria to be in the industry and murmuring about how ruefully ill-prepared I felt. I shrugged. During one particularly low valley, I’d even threatened to go back to the Red Cross. What stopped me was the stubbornness passed on to me from a certain Fredericka Theodosia Huggins, the woman I was set on rebutting.
“Well what do you want?” Warren pressed, aggravation in his tone.
“I want to learn what it’s all about,” I said, sighing. “I don’t know what I’m doing, Warren. I don’t understand it. I need to study.”
Thus began my months-long quest for formal training. Warren persisted in his belief that my innate gifts would be enough to carry me, that the well of emotion stored up during my childhood, formed by my wail amid strife in my family’s East Side home, shaped when I witnessed my mother up for auction on a Bronx sidewalk, was all the training necessary for me to infuse my portrayals with authenticity. It wasn’t. Trauma may give rise to intense feeling, but to refine one’s artistry, an actor must be taught to channel the unbridled rawness of that emotion, to effectively use it in service of a character’s every groan and grimace. Rather than placing me in a course for total beginners, Warren instead sent me to a downtown studio for actors with some experience, albeit limited. The course gave me a migraine. I’d sit in class wondering, What are these people talking about? How do they know how to gesture, whether to speak, when to emote? I couldn’t grasp it. I don’t remember the instructor’s name, but I do recall becoming friendly with his wife.
“You know,” I told her after class one day, “I really don’t like this.”
“Why not?” she asked. “What’s the matter?”
“Because I don’t understand what’s happening,” I said. “I need someone to explain this whole thing to me.”
“Don’t worry,” she said, smiling, “it’ll come.”
It didn’t—even after I’d stayed on for several more classes. She and Warren kept claiming, counterintuitively to me, that I was lost because I had too much skill. “The problem is that you’re so far ahead of your classmates there’s nothing there for you to learn,” Warren said. That assertion made no sense to me. As far as I could see, I had plenty to learn, whether or not he acknowledged it.
The next experience was significantly better but still no bull’s-eye. Warren connected me with Miriam Goldina, the Russian-born stage actress and drama coach who’d studied under Konstantin Stanislavski, the grandfather of method acting—a technique requiring a performer’s full immersion in the emotional realities of the character to be portrayed. Miriam taught me some tangibles. For one thing, she made me acutely aware of the importance of words: how to listen closely to them, how to read the spaces between them, how to become cognizant of the intent behind each. When you’re in conversation with someone, why might that person be saying what he or she is saying? What is that person trying to elicit from you? We examined those questions and many others, making me conscious of how critical it is for an artist to do more listening than speaking, a skill I’d been unknowingly practicing since my earliest years. What Miriam and I did not explore was what she likely assumed I already possessed—the fundamentals of acting, Theater 101. More than anything during that time, I craved a foundation.
That is exactly what I told Lee Strasberg on the day I enrolled at the Actors Studio, then the most prestigious theatrical collective in the nation. Lee, who’d refined and further developed Stanislavski’s approach to method acting and introduced it to the West, was training greats such as Anne Bancroft and Jane Fonda. Surely he could guide me through my labyrinth of confusion and give me the basics.
“Please,” I begged him, “I don’t want to be put in a class with professionals. I want to start from the beginning.”
Lee nodded as if he agreed, but he apparently took Warren’s word over mine and placed me with the pros. That’s how I ended up an elbow’s length away from the blond and beguiling Marilyn Monroe, then fresh off her run in the blockbuster romantic comedy The Seven Year Itch. I, too, had an itch—an instinct to flee the second I spotted her: Lord in heaven, what am I doing here!? “Hello,” she purred in my direction. That was my first time in class with Marilyn. It was also my last.
I huffed my way out of there and over to Warren’s office. “When I tell you I want to start at the bottom,” I said, “I mean the very bottom, not in a class with a big star!”
Warren, as amused by my tantrums as he was accustomed to them, just laughed. “Well all right, Cicely,” he said. “Maybe it’s time I send you over to Lloyd Richards.”
I knew the name. Diana had mentioned the distinguished acting coach to me on several occasions, most notably when I’d fallen into one of my steepest stupors about my inexperience. I’d uttered another (empty) threat that evening: I was one melancholic episode away from returning to my day job.
“You know, you really should go down to Paul Mann Actor’s Workshop,” Diana had told me. “Lloyd Richards, Paul’s business partner there, is supposed to be one of the best. Try it. And if, after you go, you find that you still can’t make sense of this business, then you can quit. But please give yourself a chance.”
Paul, an accomplished theater actor who’d founded the workshop in 1953, was Caucasian. Lloyd—a renowned African-American actor and director who, years later, went on to serve as dean of the Yale School of Drama—had created a nurturing environment for Black artists. Sidney Poitier had studied with Lloyd. So had Harry Belafonte, Ruby Dee, and Billy Dee Williams. That was résumé enough to get me across the threshold to the school.
My initial appointment was with Paul, whose introductory course was required for incoming students. Our meeting began as such encounters do, with handshakes and smiles and niceties. It ended traumatically.
“So Cicely,” he said after we’d been chatting for a few moments, “where do you see yourself going in this industry?”
As I thought about his question, his gaze traveled down from my eyes to my chest. My heartbeat raced. Paul rose from his desk and walked over to shut his door. I stood, as did every hair on my neck.
“Well, I mean,” I stammered. Before I could continue, Paul, a menacing tower of flesh, thrust himself toward me and began manhandling my breasts, attempting to remove my blouse as I shoved him away. “No!” I yelled. “Get off of me!” He tried to jam me against the wall and shove his hand under my camisole, but I somehow managed to break free. Once I’d pried myself loose, blouse untucked from my skirt, hair scattered in every direction, I grabbed my pocketbook and fled to the door. As I reached for the knob, Paul spoke. “Class begins next week,” he said in an eerily calm voice, as if he hadn’t just attacked me. “You are welcome to come.” Without looking at him, I opened the door and disappeared down the hall, holding back tears long enough to make it out the front door. Once home, I collapsed into sobs on my bed.
A week later at the start of his introductory
course, I showed up. Paul had already gathered with the group of students who’d enrolled in it, and when I entered, he stopped speaking and stared at me. “I thought I’d never see you again,” he said, incredulousness in his tone. I breathed not a sentence and took a seat.
Life is choices, and as I saw it, I had two. I could’ve fled from that man’s office and never returned. Many, understandably, might have chosen that route. And yet the alternative option, the less obvious of the two, was the one I settled upon. I had arrived at that studio with the singular purpose of training with Lloyd. And though Paul, in a show of flagrant lasciviousness, had attempted to thwart my mission, I was not to be deterred. When someone sees you headed in a direction, and that person throws a brick into the road, that is the precise moment to forge onward, with greater velocity, toward your destination. I had a purpose, one that, despite all of my wavering, I had witnessed God orchestrating. And I refused to have some man, with his hot breath on my neck and his pasty fingers on my nipples, impede my plan.
It had never been Paul’s name that had been spoken to me. It was Lloyd’s. And whatever it was that Lloyd had to offer me, I intended to get it. If that meant enduring Paul’s course so I could move on to Lloyd’s permanent tutelage, so be it. If that involved swallowing the recollection of his brazen assault, of forgetting what he’d stolen from me in the same manner a passerby once had, if that was the price to be rendered, I stood ready to pay. All these years later, what Paul did to me that day—the way he put his hands on me—the trauma is emblazoned on my memory. When someone violates you sexually, it does not simply haunt and aggrieve you; it alters the very shape of your soul.
