Just as I Am: A Memoir

by Cicely Tyson

  And yet like all who walk this earth, Miles had his imperfections, one of which became abundantly clear a few months into our courtship. Miles took as much pride in his cars as he did in his dress and appearance. He drove nothing but a Ferrari or a Maserati. But back when I’d met him, when he’d been in one of his heaviest drug periods, he’d lost both his driver’s license and the right to buy a car in his own name. So one afternoon Miles, who knew I did not drive, said to me, “I want to buy you a car.”

  “For what?” I asked. There must be something about this face of mine that makes people think I’m stupid.

  “I just think we should have a car,” he insisted, “and we can put it in your name.”

  We? I thought. “Well if you want a new car,” I told him, “you can put it in your own name. I’m not going to be the one driving it.”

  Somehow over the next few weeks, he managed to get himself both a license and a car, probably through his managers. He told me it was to be delivered at some point during the following month, but he did not mention the make and model of the car, nor did he know precisely when it would arrive. A few days later, I was walking around Midtown when, in my mind’s eye, I saw Miles in a white Ferrari, top down, speeding up Seventh Avenue in Harlem. Next to him was a fair-skinned Black woman with her hair blowing in the wind. I found my way over to a phone booth, fished out a dime from my pocketbook, slid it into the slot, and called Miles at his house. He answered.

  “Oh,” I said, “so you got the car today.” Silence. Miles, not yet aware of my sixth sense, often swore to God that I’d had a detective spying on him. “Why don’t you stop hiring people to follow me around?” he’d yell. Frankly, I didn’t need to hire anyone. He almost always gave himself away with his reactions. That time, his silence told me I’d hit a nerve.

  “Did you hear me?” I said again. “I see you got your car today.”

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “I’m on Sixth Avenue and Forty-Second,” I told him.

  “Meet me at the house,” he said. Click.

  When I arrived, he was sitting on the windowsill in the living room. “Come here, darling,” he said, drawing me into his arms. “So where were you today?”

  “I was just out and about, doing a little shopping,” I said.

  “How did you know I got the car?” he asked me.

  “A friend of mine told me she saw you driving up Seventh Avenue in a white Ferrari with the top down,” I said. He stiffened and loosened his embrace. I hadn’t even mentioned the girl I’d seen in my vision, yet his body language told me everything I needed to know. “What friend?” he said, anger in his tone. “What’s her name?” His fury rattled me, which is why I made up a fake name: Tina.

  “Where does Tina live?” he pressed. I had an aunt-in-law who then had an apartment on St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem, and in my fluster, I gave him her address. “I’m going out for a few minutes,” he told me. “I’ll be back.”

  I’m sure Miles must’ve gone straight to Harlem. I’m also sure that, if he’d turned up at my aunt’s address and asked for “Tina”—and I never heard that he did so—no one there would’ve answered to that name. All I can be certain of is that he’d indeed gotten his Ferrari that day, and that he didn’t return until hours later. We never discussed where he’d been, nor did I ever tell him about the woman I saw in my head. I forgot all about my vision until, years later, that very woman turned up.

  I didn’t need a vision to confirm Miles’s tendencies. There was real-world evidence. He once claimed he had to drive out to Long Island for a dental appointment at eight o’clock in the evening. “What kind of dentist takes patients at this hour?” I asked dubiously as he darted out his front door. He shrugged and left. It was a nice summer evening, and soon after he’d gone, I went for a walk. Miles always kept his cars parked in a garage on Riverside near his place. As I made my way down Seventy-Ninth Street, who did I see pulling out of that garage? Miles Davis. Next to him was a young white woman. I wish I had a photograph of the shock on that man’s face. I just swiveled around and marched back to the house. He later came in, saying something or other about the woman being a friend he knew through a friend. I guess she must’ve needed dental work on Long Island as well.

  I spoke not a word to Miles. As far as I was concerned, there was nothing to discuss. What could he have said to change what I’d witnessed with my own eyes? Not a thing. We were living together then, but I’d never given up my place on Seventy-Fourth. After listening to his explanations, I went back to my apartment, got in my bed, and fell sleep. When he called me a while later, I did not answer then, nor for days after. I felt deceived and hurt, most of all because he lied to me. Children lie out of fear they will be punished in some way. But adults, as I see it, have no right to lie. If you do something wrong, just fess up and say, “I did it and I’m sorry”—or you did it, and you’re not sorry. Sooner or later, the truth will come out, and the deceit, for me, can be as damaging as the offense. If he wanted to traipse around town with some white woman, so be it. I had no right to stop him. But I also didn’t need to stay around and watch him do his dirt.

  Miles and I did not argue about the woman I caught him with, or anything else during those years. I detested arguments. I grew up in a home fraught with them and the palpable tension they create. When my father pounded home after his nights out on the town, he and my mom went at it, forcefully enough to draw me, wailing, from my bed. So when I was upset at Miles, he could not drag a solitary word from my lips. That made him even more furious. He wanted to provoke an argument with me to ease his conscience, but if I’d let him draw me into his wrath, it would not have ended well. The years ahead would prove that. When I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of a response, he’d blow off steam by boxing. He had a punching bag in his backyard, and he’d be out there for hours, grunting and swinging like he was Joe Louis.

  And then there were the drugs. He did not use in front of me. In fact, in all my years with Miles, never once did he shoot up, snort cocaine, or even smoke a reefer in my presence. I’m sure Miles must’ve shot up or snorted in his bathroom, but he left no sign of it, clearing away any paraphernalia. He knew how much I despised drugs. Also, my religious upbringing ensured I had nothing to do with them. I still don’t.

  One night after Miles had played at a club in Midtown, he and I, along with some of his band members, drove uptown toward his place. One of the guys lifted a small bag, presumably filled with drugs, and offered it to me. Miles pushed away his hand. “Man, are you kidding me?” he said, laughing. “I can’t even get Cicely to smoke a cigarette.” Yet that didn’t stop him from getting his fixes privately. On many other evenings when we were on our way home, he’d pull up and park at a building near Eighty-Second and Amsterdam, then a known dope house. “I’ll be out in a few,” he’d say. I might’ve been naive about drugs, but I came to recognize the dazed, faraway look in Miles’s eyes whenever he stumbled out of that building. “I’ll be out in a few” became my cue to take a cab home. I wasn’t crazy enough to sit in his car and wait for him to drive me home in that state.

  “Why didn’t you wait for me?” he’d come through the door slurring. “I was tired of sitting in the car,” I’d tell him. Whatever he smoked or shot up, he usually reeked of it. I knew the scent of marijuana, but other than that, I couldn’t tell the difference between coke or heroin or any other drug. On many occasions, he emitted a distinctly powerful scent, like the smell of burnt iron. It permeated his pores. He’d try to cover it with cologne (he loved his collection), but I could still smell it. And when I did, I stayed as far away from him as I could, because I knew I wouldn’t have been talking to Miles anymore. I’d be having a conversation with the person he became when a substance had taken him over. The drugs. The wandering eye. The outbursts. I dealt with it then by not engaging it. I suppose it was my way of reconciling the Miles I knew, the porous soul bearing a hurt-filled past, with the Miles he became in quelling his pain.
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br />   After I’d been mute for a while following the white-woman sighting, Miles apologized the way he always did: by showering me with gifts. It was his way of attempting to win me back. Down on Fifty-Seventh Street was a women’s clothing store, a haberdashery that Miles knew I loved. He’d go in there and buy a whole rack of dresses for me. And he couldn’t find enough jewelry and flowers to present to me. On many occasions over the years, my place would be filled with so many peonies, roses, lilacs, and hydrangeas that you would’ve thought someone had just passed. I kept the clothes but never wore them, and I’d let the flowers die in their vases. My affections could not be bought, and I wanted Miles to understand that. Most of the time I did not even acknowledge his gifts, which drove him insane. And yet his presents—along with his pleas for me to return to him, and his promises that he’d sit up straight—did eventually soften me.

  I could have left Miles. He clearly had his sharp edges, jagged shards that pierced and injured me and, at times, drove me away. And yet when I looked up from my own agony and over at him, there stood a man who did not care whether he lived or died. Beneath his so-called bad boy exterior, I saw a man who was ill at his core, a tormented soul who used drugs to anesthetize his sorrows. When people attempt to destroy themselves, even if unconsciously, they have a handgrip on a knife, make no mistake. Self-injury is a statement regarding one’s own worth or its glaring lack. Miles played fast and loose with his life far too frequently to have known his value. And even while grappling with my own anguish, I could not stand by and watch this man waste the rare gift he came here to share. His behavior at times disturbed me greatly, even humiliated me. And yet more than anger, I felt compassion, and pity for his sad state. It is possible to be at once hurt by a man and heartbroken for him. I could not allow Miles to throw himself away. The loss, I felt, would’ve been too great—for me and for the world.

  One evening near the end of 1967, Dizzy Gillespie, granddaddy of bebop and a longtime friend of Miles, came by for dinner with us. On his way out, Dizzy pulled me aside. “You know, Cic,” he said, “I’ve never heard Miles talk more lovingly of anyone than he does of you.” “Really?” I said with a smile in my eyes. He nodded. “All you really need to do is take him in your arms and cradle him like a baby,” he said. “That’s love for him”—and that, in those years, is what I extended.

  13

  1968

  MILES could make me laugh so hard I’d nearly choke to death. Every time we’d sit down for dinner, he’d start up with his crazy stories. I never knew where his tales would go. A few made me cringe (like the one about a friend he called Third Story Joe, so named for his skill in scaling buildings to rob them), while others made me curious (during Miles’s childhood, his mother, when hosting ladies’ lunches, counted out her guests’ peas before serving them). Regardless of the memory shared—whether it was relishing his early years as Little Davis in Charlie Parker’s quintet or recounting how his beloved father once locked him in his guesthouse in an effort to help Miles break his drug habit, cold turkey—every one of his accounts, by the end, had me doubled over. There was something about Miles’s storytelling, peppered with color (the F-word took up residence on his tongue) and lacking in pretense (“Jazz is a nigger word that white folks dropped on us,” he’d say), that inevitably choked me up. One evening, after semi-successfully avoiding the bones in his fish soup, I slammed my spoon down and yelled, “You’re trying to kill me! Why don’t you tell me these stories when I’m not eating?” He was so full of the devil, that Miles. What an incredible sense of humor.

  And style. Miles, like my father, was a Dapper Dan, a certified stepper. He had an Italian tailor, Mario, who dressed him to the hilt. In the 1960s, men’s fashion was exactly as I prefer it: slim-fitting suits complemented with thin ties, thin lapels, thin collars—clean, and perfect for Miles’s svelte figure. Wherever the two of us turned up, boy, we turned some heads. I beamed at his side, glamorous in my couture, showing off looks by style mavens such as Arthur McGee, the first Black designer to ever run a studio. I felt proud to stand alongside Miles, loved folding my silk-gloved hands into his strong ones. “I knew, sooner or later, one of the big boys would sweep you off your feet,” Warren would tease me. Like Ossie and Ruby, Miles and I were among a handful of Black power couples of the sixties, an artistic duo that drew stares. Once when he and I were out at a dinner concert, a well-known singer I won’t name glided over to our table after she’d performed. “You’ve got the prize, Ms. Cicely,” she told me. Around town, everyone knew she’d been salivating over Miles for years. She then turned to him and said, “And I can’t tell you how lucky you are.” I smiled and pulled my sequin wrap more snuggly around my shoulders.

  One of my most cherished fashion staples was a gift from Miles. He once called up a renowned designer and said to him, “I want you to make Cicely a fur coat.” “I don’t make fur coats,” the man told him. Miles repeated his statement, the second time adding “and I want it here on December 24th.” Sure enough, by noon on Christmas Eve, an enormous brown paper bag sat in the middle of Miles’s living room floor. “What’s that?” I asked. “Well open it and see,” he said, a glint of mischief in his eyes. I lifted out the floor-length stunner and gasped. In the following years, I wore that mink out, do you hear me? And whenever I donned my Cadillac of coats, others gawked and exchanged glances. I basked in the glory and the gaze.

  Hair was central to the fashion show. I learned to style my ’fro in every manner known to Black womankind: shortly cropped, twisted out, pulled into a poof, cornrowed. For versatility, I reached for beehive wigs, clip-on chignons, and goddess braids created using extensions. In those years, Miles and I frequented Casdulan, the upscale beauty parlor on 125th Street in Harlem. Camelo Casimir, the French-Haitian owner and stylist we all called Frenchie, offered premiere hair and makeup services to the stars. Many in our circle came through there. Our friend Harold Melvin rented a booth at the salon in those days (and years later, after Frenchie passed, Harold opened his own salon on Seventy-Second Street, where it still stands). James Finney, in the era before he became Miles’s personal hairdresser, also hung around Casdulan a lot. Finney, notorious for his braiding talents, created mane masterpieces on Valerie Simpson of Ashford & Simpson and others. We all gossiped at Casdulan as much as I did at Sardi’s, exchanging scuttlebutt amid the sounds of Sam Cooke, promising us, over the salon loudspeaker, that a change was gonna come.

  That was the sixties, a peculiar combination of fashion and frivolity, protest and profound social turmoil. The decade, in our America, bore varied expressions, each seared in my memory as deeply as those of Miles’s many faces. The era radiated with ethnic pride, as Black Panthers donned kente cloths and proclaimed “Black Is Beautiful.” It spat back at its oppressors, with the Black Power Movement insisting upon change by any means necessary. It throbbed and ached, drooping its head low after the church bombing in Birmingham and the assassinations of JFK and Malcolm X. It clenched its jaw and clutched its fist, chanting “Mississippi Goddam,” Nina Simone’s anthem in response to Medgar Evers’s murder. With Freedom Rides and demonstrations, Watts riots and urban uprisings, the sixties raised its voice even as it stiffened its spine. And then, in the spring of 1968 as the decade screeched toward its close, it let out a primal wail.

  That April, Miles and I were on a tour stop in Seattle. Anytime Miles was on the road, he never wanted to go out for lunch or dinner, preferring always to preserve his energy for his performances. So in the kitchen of the apartment we stayed in, I fixed us something to eat while he sat in the living room, talking on the phone with his attorney, Harold. When their conversation ended, he laid down the phone and looked over at me. “Harold said they shot King,” he said. I continued stirring my pot of broth, feeling sure that, as usual, Miles was joking. I was just about to blurt out “Now that’s not funny!” when he delivered the remainder of his sentence: “. . . and he’s dead.”

  I folded like an accordion, my body turning in on i
tself as I faltered to my knees. The words, a penetrating dagger, stabbed me right in my solar plexus. “What?” I asked. “What did you say?” “King has been assassinated,” Miles told me. “He’s gone.”

  I will always be amazed at how a singular occurrence can break open the soul of the world. One moment you’re stirring your wooden spoon through a saucepan, lost in the aroma of savory bouillon, oblivious to what awaits. The next moment, a simple turn of the spoon later, you are down on the cold linoleum, arms cradled around yourself, numbed into silent weeping. On the evening the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on the second floor of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, the earth rocked and quaked, and then, all at once, splintered in two. The suddenness of the shift, the wrenching pain of it all, was, for me, soon followed by a personal gut punch.

  * * *

  After Dr. King’s passing, life carried on, but with a low hum of melancholy beneath it. The loss rearranged the air’s molecules, made the atmosphere heavy. Living, in those times, felt like trudging forward in the slowest of motion, more sluggish by the step. Every movement and task, even the most mundane, took on a kind of lethargy. That is how grief sits down on you. It closes in, presses your chest with all its might, and makes it difficult even to breathe.