Just as I Am: A Memoir

by Cicely Tyson

  “Vinnette Carroll is planning to direct a play called Dark of the Moon,” he told me a few months after Carib’s release. “She’s staging it at the Y in Harlem, and she’s looking for a lead. You would be perfect.”

  I stared at him perplexed, the same look I always give when I’m scrambling to come up with reasons to decline.

  “I can’t do any play,” I said. “I’ve never been on a stage in my life.” Though I knew more about film than about live theater, I’d glimpsed enough, while racing ’round town with Warren to shows, to be frightened I could not deliver. Movie filming involves take after take. In theater, there are no do-overs, no second or seventh chances. You either get it right in real time or you flounder and make a laughingstock of yourself. Warren, accustomed to my waffling, nonetheless insisted I meet Vinnette.

  Everyone in my circle knew of Vinnette. Even then, decades before her gospel-infused production of Your Arms Too Short to Box with God thundered onto Broadway in 1976, I regarded Vinnette as theater royalty, a Black female innovator amid a sea of white male faces. She’d grown up in a well-heeled Jamaican family, with a dentist father who pushed her toward medicine rather than the arts. She obliged him to a point by earning a doctorate in psychology from Columbia University, but her tug toward the stage proved too powerful to overcome. After studying with Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg, she acted for a time, even creating and touring her one-woman show. Yet amid a paucity of good roles for Black actors, she turned toward directing and teaching, joining the faculty of the prestigious High School of Performing Arts in New York. Her production of Dark of the Moon, Warren explained, would be a revival of the 1945 Broadway folk play about a witch boy, John, who yearns to become human after falling in love with a mortal girl, Barbara Allen. Vinnette would assemble an all-Black cast as part of the Harlem Y’s “Little Theater” program. The dance numbers in the play, set to spirituals, would be choreographed by a young Alvin Ailey, then also in the middle of creating what would become his signature work, Revelations.

  Warren jotted down Vinnette’s phone number and address and handed it to me. “Go see her,” he said. “She’s expecting you.” At the time of our appointment later that week, I arrived at Vinnette’s townhouse at 864 Broadway in Flatiron. What happened next makes me shake my head at myself.

  As I entered the four-story building, I was so nervous to meet the director that I began yelling her name. “Vinnette Carroll!” I screamed like a squealing cat. “Vinnette Carroll!” On and on I shouted, one wooden staircase after the next, until I finally reached her doorway at the top. There she stood, tall and elegant with saucer-round eyes, hand on her hip and half-grinning as she searched my face. “What’s the matter, Miss Cicely?” she said in that robust voice of hers.

  “Nothing,” I responded.

  “Well then why on earth are you screaming?”

  I shrugged and snickered. “Because I didn’t know where you were,” I said. It’s a wonder she didn’t send my silly tail back down those stairs and right out the door.

  I did not audition that day. Vinnette and I simply chatted, about this play and that one, about my experience in Carib, about that moment I’d first encountered theater magic in Midtown. At some point I must have done a script reading for her. I don’t recall. But soon after we connected, my misgivings melted away, as they were prone to do in Vinnette’s affirming presence. Before I knew it, she and Warren had persuaded me to make my theater debut as Barbara Allen. She’d coach me, she promised, and supplement Lloyd’s guidance of me. I agreed—and little has been the same in my life since.

  Lloyd and Vinnette were both theatrical masters, but they shepherded me in markedly different ways. Whereas Lloyd preferred a minimum effective dose of intervention, Vinnette took an interactive approach, one that included homework and built upon my childhood tendency to ask “Why?” During one of our sessions, Vinnette said to me, “I want you to observe someone from afar and then create a backstory for her. People don’t come out of nowhere. They have roots.” Someone’s appearance and demeanor, she reasoned, offer clues to those beginnings, to the whys and hows of that person’s present state. That notion becomes applicable when analyzing a character, when noticing how his or her story may manifest in every tic and sway, every lurch forward. Infusing a portrayal with such layers of truth is an actor’s greatest aspiration.

  I put my own handprint on that assignment by attempting what I’d been doing since my earliest years: staring at people’s feet. On the train that week, I observed a Jewish woman, immaculately coiffed and manicured, with a lavish mink stole draped around her shoulders. I looked down. She had on saddle Oxfords, tattered around the edges, scuffed at the toe, with a bunion the size of a golf ball butting its head against the leather interior, threatening to break free. In that moment, I decided her wealth had to have been acquired. Perhaps she was a refugee who’d escaped to the United States, seeking a better life as my parents once had. If she’d been someone born into privilege, no way would she have donned such footwear or, for that matter, even boarded a subway car. I created a whole probable history for this woman based on those shoes, and submitted it to Vinnette. “Very good, Miss Cicely,” said Vinnette, using the name she always called me. I beamed.

  Vinnette taught me to learn technique and then to forget it—and to resurrect it only if it served my portrayal. Technique is important, to the extent that it is undergirded by emotion. I once knew an actress who was a brilliant technician, but her portrayals fell flat. She could create a moment and bring it to fruition, yet it was apparent she wasn’t feeling anything, and as a result, neither was her audience. What is required for such a moment is what Warren had been claiming I had naturally. Vinnette trained me to mine the quarries of that childhood emotion and offer the riches onstage. When you’re a novice, it’s so important that whoever coaches you at that juncture knows what he or she is doing. Actors who find one great teacher in this business are blessed, do you hear me? God saw fit to smile on me twice.

  Once Vinnette gave me the script for Dark of the Moon, it did not leave my hands. I ate with it, bathed with it, slept with it, slow danced to its tune during every hour of every day. “I want you to come for a table reading at the Y,” Vinnette told me after we’d been studying with one another for a time. I was such a theater rookie that I’d never heard of a table read—a gathering of the cast for a script run-through. On the afternoon I turned up, my fellow actors had already assembled—and I didn’t yet know a soul among them. Richard Ward and Isabel Sanford were on one side of the table. Clarence Williams III, Lea Scott, and Louise Stubbs sat on the other. I drew in a breath, clutched my script toward my chest, and took a place next to Roscoe Lee Browne, who’d been cast as a preacher. The previous year, he’d made his stage debut in a New York Shakespeare Festival production of Julius Caesar.

  When my turn came, I picked up the script, held it three inches from my face, and began muttering my lines. Roscoe smiled, reached over, and gently pulled my hands down. I returned his grin but then moved my hands back up and perched the script on top of my nose again. On and on this went for most of the reading: me burying my fears into the pages, him encouraging me to reveal my face. Finally, near the end of the reading, Roscoe pulled my hands away once more, touched the bottom of my chin, and tilted my head upward. “You are going to be marvelous,” he said in his deep baritone. “Just marvelous.” I giggled, partly because I felt awkward—and partly because I hoped God had heard Roscoe.

  As my stage debut grew closer, Emily told our mother I was to star in a play. “Huh, she goin’ up there and make a fool of herself,” Mom said in her thickest accent. Upon hearing this report from Emily, I called my mother and asked her to come to the show’s opening night. At the time, I did not fully understand what compelled me to reach for the phone and dial my mom, particularly amid the gulf of unspoken hurts that had separated our worlds. Yet something in me wanted her there. Acting is, in part, about laying bare a character’s soul, about allowing someone’
s secret hopes and frailties to be, at long last, seen. I realize now, in reflecting upon it, that I longed simply for my mother to see me. That is all. I needed to know that this left turn I’d taken, this calling I’d followed, was worthy of her acknowledgment. To be seen in this life, truly observed without judgment, is what it feels like to be loved. Whoever else might have shown up at my play, there was no gaze of pride, no measure of applause that would have mattered more to me than that woman’s approval. That is why I invited her. And, perhaps because she was so stunned to hear from me, my mother immediately agreed to come.

  On opening night, boy, I was a heap of nerves. Before the show, I made sure I knew exactly where my mom and the friend accompanying her would sit, which was at the center of the theater and about ten rows back from the stage. If I so much as glanced in my mother’s direction, if our eyes inadvertently crossed paths as I was performing, that would have been the end of me. Knowing her precise location, I reasoned, would allow me to avoid her stare. It would not, as I soon discovered, put her on mute.

  The lights faded and a hush swept the theater. The moment I emerged and took my place on the set, I could hear Mom’s voice instantly. “Oh my God!” she said to her friend in what she thought was a whisper. I assure you it was not. “There she is! There’s my String Bean!” The whole way through Act One, as I attempted to stay focused, I could hear her oooing and cooing, pointing out this prop and that one, and, as if creating a soundtrack to go along with the story line, laughing and drawing in deep breaths with her palm pressed over her heart. It just about drove me crazy.

  Still, I somehow managed to concentrate, and by Act Two I’d even disappeared into my secret kingdom, that magical realm I withdraw to when a character’s spirit washes through me. Barbara Allen’s words, the sentences and scenes I’d rolled around on my tongue for so long, flowed effortlessly from my lips that evening. Acting, like every art form, is meant to transport its beholders, and the artist is frequently the first to make the journey. On my trip as Barbara Allen, I could speak. I could utter sentiments that I, Cicely Tyson, might never dare express. Revealing her interior world felt like unburdening my own, like emptying my soul of its every weight and care. It felt the way it did when I, playing a battered upright piano as a girl, moaned the words to old hymns that soothed my insides. It felt the way it had on that Sunday in church, decades earlier, when the saints had thrust me heavenward while I bellowed. On my first theater stage in a Harlem Y, I was that child once more, feet dangling from a chair, Holy Ghost sweeping through me. It felt like finding a sense of freedom I hadn’t known I was in search of.

  To the very last scene, Mom kept right on talking. After the audience bathed me in warm applause, I eventually found my way to the exit where the crowd was filing out. There stood my mother, with her pillbox hat and Sunday pocketbook, beaming as she accepted congratulatory remarks on my behalf. “Yes, I always knew, ever since she was a little girl, that she was going to be an actress,” she claimed. “She liked to sing and to dance, and . . .” Now wait a minute, I thought. This is the same mother who put me out of her house, the woman who would not speak to me because I wanted to act. And now she’s out here telling this barefaced story to these people? I found it so unbelievable that I stared at her and burst into laughter. All these years later, I’m still shaking my head.

  I think now that my mother’s pivot had nothing to do with a shift in her perspective. The devil, as she saw it, lived not just in the details, but also along the boulevards and byways of my business. Her view had not changed in that regard. Still, whether my mother admitted it to me forthrightly, which she did not on that evening, her behavior had rendered her opinion, handed down a verdict of validation. As she’d observed me from her place in the audience, open-mouthed and spellbound, she’d seen me as she could not have before, in that way you can see a thing only when you pull back from it, when you step away so you can marvel at its entirety. In panning out, she’d recognized me, for the first time, not just as a daughter to be lorded over, but as a vessel bearing a gift. And the heavenly Father, for reasons then unknown to both of us, had chosen to grace me with the seed of it.

  Part Two

  Rooted

  A race without the knowledge of its history is like a tree without roots.

  —CHARLES C. SIEFERT,

  The Negro’s or Ethiopian’s Contribution to Art

  11

  Riverside Park

  MILES DAVIS could play that horn, I’ll tell you—blew echoes of his brilliance right down through the centuries. That trumpet was his voice. In every riff and timbre of Kind of Blue, his 1959 album, you can hear his longing, feel his sorrow between the notes. A mother once took her eight-year-old daughter to see Miles in concert, and when it was finished, the girl said, “Mom, when he plays, it sounds like a baby crying.” Through his trumpet Miles told his story, found his solace, spoke his truth. And long before I met him in the flesh, he’d already spoken to me.

  I’d been curious about Miles for some time, especially once I heard he lived in Diahann Carroll’s building. I’d first crossed paths with Diahann during my earliest days in theater, when Warren was still trotting me all over Broadway. She and I met backstage in 1955 at House of Flowers, the Harold Arlen–Truman Capote musical she starred in with Pearl Bailey. Diahann had a wicked sense of humor, and after our first laugh that evening, we never stopped cracking up. We became such good friends that we’d often go bike riding together all over Manhattan, a giggle punctuating each turn of the pedals. When I stopped by her apartment on Tenth Avenue, she mentioned that Miles and his wife, Frances Taylor, the dancer, lived on her floor. Diahann and Frances were close, so she knew all about him: the good, the bad, the genius and the drugs, the roving eye and the running around. She never let me go without telling me how talented he was. “Why does he play with his back turned to the audience?” I asked. Around town, I’d heard others remark that he seemed arrogant. “Who knows, child,” Diahann said. I thought I’d show up at one of his concerts and see for myself.

  Miles was playing at Lewisohn Stadium, the West Harlem amphitheater where so many of the greats performed. There in 1952, Marian Anderson, alongside the New York Philharmonic, lifted her contralto to the heavens. Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Leontyne Price—they all came through Lewisohn. I took the number 1 train up to 137th Street and found my way to the back of the open-air stadium. I had no intention of Miles seeing me. I climbed up to the last seat in the last row so I could take in the scene widely, observe Miles and his quintet from afar. There he was onstage, short ’fro, sculpted cheekbones, skin so velvety dark that it almost looked unreal. And boy, was he sharp: Brooks Brothers blazer, coolness personified. He blew that horn with such tenderness, such passion that it gave me goose pimples, the way it still does. He indeed turned his back to the audience; years would pass before I understood why. When the concert was over, I got back on the subway, returned home, and thought little more of him. Until the day, months later, when Miles showed up at Diahann’s apartment while I was visiting her.

  Diahann and I were sitting in her living room, laughing and carrying on, when we heard her front door creak open. “Diahann,” said a raspy voice from down the hall. Before either of us could move, Miles, still in his housecoat, rounded the corner. He was holding a measuring cup in his hand. “I need some sugar,” he said. Miles, Diahann had told me, was quite a cook. As Diahann nodded and rose, Miles stared over at me. “Who’s that?” he asked Diahann. “That’s Cicely Tyson,” Diahann said, chuckling. He never said a word to me. Once he had his sugar, he went on about his business.

  Sometime in 1965 is when I spotted Miles on a bench in Riverside Park. By then, I’d moved from my place with Thelma up to Seventy-Fourth Street on the West Side. Miles lived nearby, in a brownstone at 312 West Seventy-Seventh Street. He and his close friend, Corky McCoy, the illustrator, were sitting side by side on the bench that morning, taking in the sun. I spotted Miles before he saw me and decided I’d sashay on
by.

  “Hey you,” he said. I kept right on walking. I am not “hey” or “you,” I thought.

  “Ms. Tyson,” he said, “how are you?”

  I smiled and turned around, but only part way. “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Come here,” he said. “I want to talk to you for a minute.”

  I hesitated, not sure I wanted to be bothered. He was still married, and I had no interest in messing with no married man. When I told him that, he laughed.

  “Frances and I have been separated for a while,” he said.

  “Well I have never heard that,” I said, “so have a good day.” I then walked off.

  A few months later, I saw Miles again: same bench, same park, same glimmer in his eye as I strolled past. This time, he at least started out right, by addressing me by my name. We chatted briefly. He was just back from playing in San Francisco, I think, and I asked him about his time there. Just as I was wishing him well and turning to leave, he said, “Why don’t you come see me sometime?”

  “See you for what?” I said, stalling as I do when I don’t know what else to say.

  “Why don’t you come by the house,” he said. “My housekeeper, Burlina, is a good cook. She’ll fix us a good lunch. Just come.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe . . .” I said, trailing off into shyness. “I’ll think about it.”

  I knew of Burlina. She was a cousin to Harold Melvin, then a prominent hairstylist. For years, Burlina had kept house for Harold, and when he heard that Frances had fled the marriage in 1965 and moved out to California (and once they split, they never reunited), Harold sent his cousin over to take care of Miles. Around then, I got an earful from Diahann: Miles had apparently overdosed while he was in California and was found unconscious in a gutter. The friends who discovered him had cleaned him up, fed him, made sure he got plenty of rest, and then sent him back to Burlina’s care in New York. On the day he invited me to come see him, he didn’t look like any drug addict. He was a shiny penny, Black as me and then some, bright and glistening as the sun kissed his forehead. He didn’t appear to be someone who’d known such troubles, and I couldn’t imagine he’d ever hurt a woman.