Just as I Am: A Memoir

by Cicely Tyson

  I said nothing at first. Every cell in my body screamed for me to put down that receiver, to walk away from this man who’d caused me so much aggravation. And yet I could not turn away. From the day Miles and I had first connected in Riverside Park all those years earlier, I’d felt a profound pull toward him, an attraction that runs counter to logic and leans toward mystery. I knew about the drugs. I’d heard the stories of his philandering, and during my first time around with Miles, I’d experienced the grief of it. Folks were always wondering aloud how the two of us, a church girl and a drug addict, could ever possibly fit together. They couldn’t understand why I was so drawn to him, and in my quiet moments, even I sometimes questioned that.

  What was dim to me then, at age fifty-three, I see more clearly now. Miles felt desperate for someone to save him from himself, someone who wanted nothing to do with the drugs destroying him. He yearned for someone he could trust to climb down into the gutter and pull him out, while never succumbing to the forces that lured him there. And I, the daughter of a man fueled by a rage as potent as any narcotic, needed someone to save. As a girl, I’d looked on in helpless horror as my father and mother went to war, as my daddy raised his voice and fist to the mother of his children. Try as I did, I could not end the battle. Miles, for me, was a chance to at last provide a remedy, to lend myself to the care of another human being, to help fix a situation badly in need of repair. He had a strong need to be cared for, and that need intersected with my desire to provide care. That is why, when Miles called me that day pleading for my help, I finally whispered yes.

  When I saw Miles for the first time back in New York, he looked worse than he’d sounded on the phone. He was fifty-two then but appeared twenty years older. He hobbled across the floor to his front door to greet me, as pain shot through his legs with every step. He’d even bought himself a wheelchair to use around the house. He’d lost a tremendous amount of weight, with loose flesh hanging from his lower jaw. His eyes were dim. He hadn’t picked up the trumpet for the longest time, he told me, which was the surest sign of his despondency.

  We didn’t move in together, nor had I ever given up my place on Seventy-Fourth Street a few blocks from his brownstone (and around this time, in California, I’d finally moved out of Bill Haber’s home and into a place I had purchased on Malibu Beach). When I was in New York, I mostly stayed with Miles. Once I saw what bad shape he was in, I did not want to leave him. I was surprised at how quickly we fell back into an easy rhythm, the way you do when you hear a favorite song you haven’t heard in years. We’d sit for hours at his kitchen table, laughing and carrying on about all that had happened in the world during our years apart. He teased me about the scratchy voice I’d used in Jane Pittman, claiming I’d stolen it from him. I just shook my head and smiled, since we both knew that was nonsense. I didn’t have much film work, so that year, I made Miles my project.

  I took Miles to see Dr. Shen, a Chinese herbalist I’d heard about. A woman in the business, an actress I won’t name, had gone to see Dr. Shen when she was suffering with a major physical ailment. Weeks later, after following his treatment plan, she’d left his office in tears of gratitude because he’d been able to cure her. I’d once overheard this woman’s secretary mention that story and Dr. Shen, and I wrote down his name and address, which was on Bayard Street in Chinatown. I found Dr. Shen’s number and called him about Miles. “Bring him here,” he told me. When we entered his office on a Sunday morning, the waiting room was packed.

  Dr. Shen called for Miles, and I went in with him. In silence, the doctor took Miles’s pulse and blood pressure. He then checked his eyes, listened to his heart and lungs, and laid him on an exam table. He pressed on his abdomen, asking him if he felt any soreness. Miles’s groan provided the answer. As Miles sat up on the side of the table, the doctor drew in a deep breath. “You might have two, maybe three weeks left,” he said. Miles stared at him blankly, the blood draining from his face as he absorbed a sentence neither of us had expected to hear. No one spoke for a full minute.

  “Let’s step outside,” I finally said to Miles. In the hall, I asked him whether I could talk with Dr. Shen alone, to hear the details of his full assessment. Miles agreed. Back in the room, I closed the door.

  “Please tell me what the problem is,” I said to Dr. Shen.

  “His vital organs are shot,” he explained. “I don’t think I can help him. It might be too late.”

  I stared at him. “You don’t know who this man is,” I said to him as tears filled my eyes. He of course, like the world, understood who Miles was as a performer, but the shell of a man who’d shown up in his office was irrefutably on his way out of here. “Please, whatever you can do, it is important that we try to help him,” I pleaded. “He cannot believe that we’ve given up on him.”

  The doctor stared at the floor for a long moment, and then returned his gaze to me. “All right,” he said, exhaling. “But he will have to do everything that I tell him to do.” I assured him that I’d see to it. In a cab headed back uptown, I shared with Miles what Dr. Shen had requested. With fear in his eyes, he nodded yes.

  Thus began the road back for Miles. The doctor had sent me home with a bushel of herbs, a bag so enormous we’d hardly been able to get it into the back of the taxi. His instructions to me were precise: put a portion of it into a massive pot, boil it down for several hours, and have Miles drink eight ounces of the liquid every day. He also gave me a container of concentrated clear gel, and frankly, I don’t know what it was—some kind of Chinese remedy. Every morning, Miles was to stir a spoonful of it into whatever he was eating, which, because I was preparing his meals, became whole foods—vegetables only—rich with nutrients. And above all, he could consume no drugs or alcohol of any kind during the course of treatment. On Sundays, Dr. Shen had told me, we were to return to his office so he could monitor Miles’s progress and load us down with more herbs.

  Praise God that by the time Miles had called on me for help, he was so sick that he’d already given up cocaine, cold turkey. In our earlier years together, I’d watched him wean himself a couple of times. His process was remarkable to me. He’d first let go of all the hard drugs and liquor, then marijuana, then cigarettes, then even beer. He’d close himself off in his room and stay in bed for weeks, sweating and moaning while his system revolted. In the end, he’d be sitting at the table with a cup of water, looking like he’d never been hooked.

  When it came to Dr. Shen’s prescription, Miles was a willing student. He followed the orders to the letter, and as far as I was concerned, he did not have a choice. I was not going to let this man die. I counted it a miracle that we even made it to the third and fourth appointments, given Dr. Shen’s assessment during visit one. In addition to the herbs, the doctor added in an ancient herbal tea for Miles to drink twice daily, to aid in restoring his vital organs. Miles did so dutifully. On a couple of Sundays when Miles’s body was riddled with pain, I nonetheless dragged him to that office, wheeling him in there in his wheelchair. Week by week, his condition slowly improved. Even Dr. Shen, upon examining him, seemed surprised at the pace of his recovery. He was still quite sick, still limping and hunched over, but a little at a time, I could see the life returning to his countenance. Six months after Dr. Shen told Miles he had just weeks left in this life, that man picked up his horn again.

  In the year after Miles and I got back together, he proposed marriage to me twice more, in his own way. “So when are we going to do this thing?” he’d ask, grinning. I demurred. I felt beyond certain of my love for him, yet I thought our relationship was fine as it was. In my mind, we didn’t need to formalize the feelings that had been proved. But the better Miles got to feeling, the louder his chorus of insistence became. During the holidays, around my birthday in 1979, he again asked me to marry him. This time, probably because he’d worn me down, I said yes. His eyes filled with tears as he embraced me. “I’m going to try this shit one more time,” he said, laughing. I was to be the third M
rs. Miles Davis. I was also to be the last.

  Miles sealed the deal soon after. When I arrived at his place one evening, he met me at the door. “I got you an emerald,” he said, beaming. “What do you mean, you got me an emerald?” I asked, wondering why he’d choose a green stone. “Go down to the jeweler tomorrow and see if you like it,” he said, scribbling the address on a piece of paper and handing it to me. The next morning, at the shop, the man at the counter pried opened a black velvet box to reveal a sparkling solitaire. He slid it onto my finger as I gasped. “Oh, I guess he must’ve meant an emerald cut,” I said, laughing. Turns out Miles had asked a woman in his manager’s office what ring he should choose, and she told him, “Get her an emerald cut.” Miles, who didn’t know a marquise from a princess from a cushion cut, grabbed onto the word he understood: emerald.

  Following our engagement, I got involved with various film projects, so we took our time setting a wedding date. Meanwhile, Miles would sometimes teasingly say to me, “You’re a big movie star. What do you want with an old man like me?” That question had less to do with my desires and more to do with his physical state. Dr. Shen had pulled him back from death’s cliff edge, no doubt, but he was still on that cliff. Miles knew he wasn’t long for this world, and as grateful as he was that I would commit to him, he couldn’t quite understand it. Others echoed his dubiousness. “Why are you marrying him?” someone asked me. “Can’t you see he’s dying?” But I had no reservations. I was not focused on his exterior, his frame. From the beginning, I’d loved Miles for his innards, for the man that he was even at his most vulnerable. And I knew that if I could just get him standing up straight again, if I could get him back on the stage and reconnected with his purpose, this man wasn’t going anyplace.

  19

  Thanksgiving Day

  BY THE fall of 1981, Miles and I still hadn’t married. “When are we going to do this thing?” he asked me again that October. Neither of us wanted an elaborate affair, nor did we want to just go down to city hall. “You know, the Cosbys invited us for Thanksgiving dinner at their place in Massachusetts,” I reminded him. “Why don’t we have a small ceremony there?” Miles loved the idea, and I said I’d ring Bill.

  “I am calling to accept the invitation to dinner,” I told Bill over the phone that week. “And how about a wedding at your home on Thanksgiving Day?” The line went silent for a moment. “Whoops!” he finally said, I’m sure because he was stunned. “Let me ask my wife,” he said. Camille graciously agreed, and soon after, I called Andrew Young, the US ambassador to the United Nations and ordained minister who had just been elected mayor of Atlanta. I’d known and admired Andrew for years and had once said to him, “If I ever marry again, I want you to officiate.” I told him about our plans, and like Bill, Andrew suddenly got the hiccups: “Whoops!” Once he picked up his jaw from the ground, he said he’d be honored to marry us a few weeks later. “I’m traveling now,” he told me, “and I’d want to stop back through Atlanta and bring my wife to the wedding.” I thanked him and assured him we’d be delighted to have Jean there.

  I knew exactly who should make my dress. A few months earlier I’d been honored with an award in North Carolina, and George Peter Stavropoulos, a Greek designer in New York, made a dress I adored. I asked him to replicate that very design using gold-tinged lace for the bodice and billowy cream chiffon for the skirt and sleeves. Further in step with the eighties fashion trends, I even had my shoes made with fabric matching the dress. I chose my heel height carefully. At five feet eight inches or so, Miles was a few inches taller than me, but I sensed it bothered him when I wore pumps that brought me to eye level. So I chose one-inch kitten heels.

  My hair was still natural then, a medium ’fro, and I don’t know what gave me the idea that I should relax it. Perhaps I wanted to make my hairstyle the “something new” on my special day, but it instead turned out to be something disastrous. A week before the wedding, I went to see Ruth Santiago, a hairdresser and friend I’d been going to for years. “I’ll relax it one section at a time,” she told me—first the back, and then the front. Once I was in her chair, she parted my hair section by section and carefully layered on the creamy white lye to the back half of my hair. She and I got to talking about my forthcoming nuptials, and in the middle of a sentence, she stopped, glanced up at the clock, and shrieked. By the consternation on her face, I knew she’d left the chemicals on my head too long. She rushed me to the sink bowl as she asked, “Is your scalp burning?” For whatever reason, it wasn’t. Honey, she turned on that cold water so fast, with tears streaming down her cheeks as quickly as that tap was flowing. She finally got me back into her chair and began combing, with her fingers, through my newly straightened strands, and as she did, handfuls of my wet hair came out into her hands. By the time she got done combing, the whole back half of my hair was completely gone. Thank God she had parted it off, because if she hadn’t, I would’ve been as bald as I was on the day I was born. I didn’t say a word.

  I’m a strange duck, in that when something goes wrong, I don’t cry. Instead, I immediately shift my focus onto how I will get through it. “Listen,” I told her amid her panic and apologies. “Let’s just slick down my hair in the front over the back, and then put a stocking cap on it,” I told her, thinking I could hide it with a wig. After leaving the salon that afternoon, looking like a runaway jailbird, I called my dress designer with an idea. “Can you design me a cap to go with that dress?” I asked him. He said he could. Using the same colored lace he’d sewn into my bodice, he created a crown of gold, customized to fit precisely over my half-’fro, with its bottom edge resting perfectly along my nape. The wedding guests would be none the wiser.

  Very few people knew Miles and I were to marry. Even my family, including my daughter and siblings, did not know. I didn’t tell them because I didn’t want to hear folks’ mouths, didn’t want anyone to distract me from what I was intent on doing. I’m sure Emily must have had a clue about the marriage when, a week before the wedding, I called to ask whether I could borrow Mom’s gold wedding band, which our mother had left to her. Though Miles and I had more rings than we knew what to do with (in addition to my engagement ring, the Cosbys eventually surprised us with gold wedding bands bearing the inscription “My only one”), I still wanted my mother’s band near me, adorning one of my fingers. It would be my way of having her with me in spirit, if not in the flesh. Mom had never met Miles up close. In the mid-1960s, during Act One of our love story, Mom had once been with me when I’d stopped by to visit him before an event. But for reasons unknown to me, Mom preferred to wait in the car while I went in, perhaps because her Dosha reticence arose. When Miles peered out of his front window and waved, she politely waved back with a satin-gloved palm. I am not sure what my mother would’ve made of Miles. I knew only that I wanted her with me, in one way or another, on our wedding day. Emily agreed to lend me the ring, and I sent a messenger for it.

  The evening before the wedding Miles and I arrived at the Cosbys’ home, a sprawling, tree-filled estate near the Deerfield River in western Massachusetts. We settled into an upstairs suite, one Camille had designated just for us, and I began unpacking. I’d arranged for all of my items to be delivered there ahead of time: the dress, the shoes, the cap, the ring. I laid them all out, enjoyed a lovely dinner with our hosts, and ended the evening with a soak in the tub.

  Nerves kept me tossing and turning that night, and at daybreak, my eyes flew open. The wedding was to be at 4 p.m. in the living room, before the holiday meal. Other than Andrew and his wife, none of the Cosbys’ twelve or so guests had any idea they would witness our nuptials. That afternoon, I donned my dress and cap and slid on my nylon stockings as Miles steam-ironed his Brooks Brothers suit. When I went over to the dresser where I’d laid my mother’s band, it was gone. “Have you seen the ring?” I asked Miles. He hadn’t. He and I turned that house upside down looking for that ring. As I searched, my heart hammered away in my chest at the thought that I
’d somehow lost such an irreplaceable treasure. At 3:30, I finally had to give up the search so I could gather myself for the vows. Bill and Camille presented us with the gift of their bands to be used for the ceremony.

  Camille gathered the guests. Andrew, clutching a Bible, stood near a gorgeous fireplace mantel. A hush fell over the sitting room as I descended, one careful step at a time in my lace-and-chiffon stunner, down a tall marble staircase. Bill escorted me. Miles, who had already taken his place near Andrew, straightened his spine—as much as he could. Still broken and hunched over with illness, he could hardly even stand up. His face, grey and sunken, revealed his physical deterioration. As I drew closer, he fixed his gaze on me and did not once blink. When Bill placed my hands into his, Miles leaned toward me and whispered to me a sentence I will forever remember: “Thank you for saving my life.” If I’d had any hair on the back of my head, it would’ve stood up. Tears filled his eyes as Andrew led us through our traditional vows, promises that Miles’s health had already begun to test. As I uttered the phrase “for as long as we both shall live,” I hoped, for the second time in my life, the covenant could be kept. I shed tears at both of my weddings, the first time, at age eighteen, because I’d been forced to marry. Nearly four decades later, I cried happy tears as I willingly spoke my vows.

  The feast was served at Camille’s impeccably set banquet table, with tall candles twinkling in the dusk. Among the guests were some I knew, including the actors Clarence Williams III and Gloria Foster, who were then married. Clarence got into the business because of me. In 1962, I was playing in Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, which Vinnette Carroll directed. Vinnette was serious about her rehearsals, do you hear me? If anyone so much as sneezed to interrupt, she’d have a fit. One night Clarence came to the Y to visit his sister who worked there, and while she was finishing up her duties, Clarence began roaming around the facility. He cracked open a door where we were rehearsing, and when he did, light rushed in. “Who is that back there!?” Vinnette yelled out as a sheepish Clarence crawled to a back-row seat.