Friends: A Love Story

by Angela Bassett

  Chapter 6

  When Life Was Grand

  In the summer of 1986 Ahren and I moved to New York together. We got an apartment in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn. There were mice running all up the house. Thank goodness Bottom was there, so they didn’t come into our room. But every now and then a baby mouse would sneak in and Bottom would bat it around and play with it. Bottom weighed ninety pounds. We’d say, “Bottom, let the little mouse go!”

  Bottom was still totally untrained. And it was his nature to howl when he heard sirens. He could hear a siren five miles away. But if your dog howls when you live in an apartment, they will put you out. So every time we heard a siren we grabbed his snout to keep him from opening his mouth. He became such a part of our rhythm we would wake up out of a dead sleep when we’d hear him starting to howl. I’d reach down onto the floor, grab his snout and keep him from opening his mouth until the noise went out of range and he’d go back to sleep.

  The first summer we lived there we tried to get our relationship back to square one. We put one foot in front of the other. We lived off our savings. With the money I had earned from Fences, we knew we could go nine months out if we scraped our pennies together. Ahren got a temp job and was auditioning. I also started auditioning right away. We were poor as could be, and that summer was hot as blazes! We were hot and miserable and scared and hopin’ and prayin’ and countin’ pennies.

  We still hadn’t figured out our relationship. We probably should have been thinking about marriage. But neither of us knew how to talk about commitment, much less about marriage. That July I was offered a role in the movie Hamburger Hill, the story of one of the bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War. I was shocked. My agent promised, “This is going to launch you….” Ahren was gracious, as always. “I’m so happy for you, Courtney. It’s going to be wonderful.” But beneath her kindness and love, the troubles in our relationship had not been fully mended.

  Right before I left for the Philippines, where Hamburger was filmed, we learned that Fences would be heading to Broadway via San Francisco. Between these two roles, for me, it was confirmation that I’d made the right choice when I’d decided to turn down Native Son to return to school.

  “Wow! You did the right thing, Court!” my parents affirmed.

  “I knew what I wanted to do in my heart,” I told them. “I just got confused.”

  I was in the Philippines for about two months. Being outside the country for the first time in my life was amazing. The first thing I noticed when I got off the plane was whoosh!—the humidity. The second was that every person who came up to me asked, “Are you Magic Johnson?” The country was a political hotbed. The United States had just decided to pull all of its troops off the bases where they had been stationed for years. Corazón Aquino was president and bombs seemed to be going off everywhere. The black people who lived there, who people called “negritos,” were physically very small in stature and treated worse than poor black folks in the States. It was very painful to see.

  All of us in the Hamburger cast were unknowns: Don Cheadle, Dylan McDermott, myself…. They hardly paid us anything so they could spend the money elsewhere, like on blowing a lot of things up to make the movie seem realistic. One of the first days they started filming I was sitting with the director thinking out the next shot, when I heard a commotion. A man was down and they were performing CPR on him. We learned shortly that it was one of the electricians on the set. He had gotten electrocuted. He was dead before he hit the ground. We were all in a state of disbelief. This was supposed to be a movie—it was supposed to be fun. But after that I felt, “Can we go home now?” The cast and crew voted to stay. It was not pleasant. We were traumatized. On top of that, there were no trailers and it rained constantly, so the filming was grueling and uncomfortable. I made lifelong friends, but it wasn’t a pleasant experience.

  In the meantime Ahren and I were just trying to keep our relationship going. We wrote a lot of letters back and forth because we couldn’t afford phone calls. In the back of my head I was wondering if Ahren and I would still be a couple when I got back.

  Some of the guys were losing their natural minds with all the sex trade over there. You could just pick out a twelve-year-old and have sex with her—you could walk into a room and they had young girls lined up along the walls and up the stairs. I thought, “This is too much for me. I’m getting out of here. I’m not hangin’ out and doin’ a whole bunch of mess. I can’t take this, it’s too much for my spirit.” Some of the other guys said, “Oh, Courtney, come hang out and have some fun.” But I didn’t care. I was on triple overload. I couldn’t take anything that was painful to my spirit. I would come home, do my work, write in my journal and go to bed.

  Boy, was I ever happy to get home! Ahren and I celebrated my return and had a wonderful Christmas. We had struggled, but we broke through to the other side. We’d been through thick and thin and decided we were going to make a go of it. We thought, “This is going to work. We’re going to make this work. How it’s going to work, I don’t know. But we’re going to work on it.” Once again, we probably should have started talking about marriage but didn’t.

  I had a couple of weeks of downtime then began rehearsals for the pre-Broadway run of the play. Life was grand. I was on top of the world. Everything was new, but I still had the same types of personal issues. My father was a people pleaser, and now I had become one, too. And people liked me, so I could get away with things. I was prone to tell folks what they wanted to hear whether or not it was quite accurate. And even though my parents had taught me right from wrong, I wanted and needed attention and affirmation. I knew the business of entertainment was cutthroat. When no one was watching, whose morals were going to win out? I didn’t have enough of my own moorings and moral center to maintain my integrity in the gray zones. I began to play the good boy, but when I thought I could, I’d try to get away with little stuff. I’d tell little white lies to people—I’d tell one person one thing and another person another. In my mind my intention was to fix it later. Until then, the ends justified the means. I still looked at myself as a good person. I was getting all these accolades, and I had people around me who believed in me, were confident and on my side, to lean on. People were amazed by my accomplishments. The experiences I was having were amazing! “Will you look at this boy—just graduated from Yale, got a film and about to go to Broadway!”

  In retrospect, I find it very interesting that the same kinds of personality problems I was having were reflected in Bottom’s behavior. Bottom was a really good dog at heart but had gotten big, was misbehaving and was generally out of control. Ahren couldn’t handle him. I decided to hire a dog trainer.

  “Tell the dog to come, Courtney,” the trainer told me.

  “Come here, Bottom!” As usual, Bottom took a good five minutes to come to me. He looked at me; he walked around; he sniffed at this and that; he played little games.

  “Oh, I’ve got it,” he said. “You’ve confused your dog. The dog is fine, I’ve gotta train you!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve got to tell the dog exactly what to do—how to please you. If you don’t tell him how to please you, he doesn’t know. He’ll do what he wants to do.”

  “Oh, wow…”

  “Whatever side of the sidewalk you want Bottom to walk on, tell him that’s his side. He’ll gradually know that that’s his side.”

  I thought about what we’d been doing. Sometimes I’d tell Bottom what side I wanted him on and sometimes I wouldn’t. No wonder he’d look at me like, “You didn’t tell me that last night when it was dark and no one was looking out those big windows—you let me take a dump on those people’s lawns then. Now when they’re lookin’, you want me at the curb? Hmmph!”

  When he didn’t do what I wanted, I’d call him to me and would spank him or hit him on the nose. But he was a very intelligent dog. The next time I’d call him he wouldn’t come.

  “Courtney, who wants to com
e when they know they’re going to get a spanking?”

  “Good point. No one, I guess.”

  “Whenever your dog comes to you, it should feel like home. Good or bad, it’s home. So praise him, then take him over to what he did and reprimand him. But do it with love so that your dog can’t get enough of you.”

  We rehearsed for Fences in New Haven then performed at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco. When we returned to New York there was major drama behind the scenes. August Wilson and the producer Carol Shorenstein Hays couldn’t come to an agreement about how the play should end, and Lloyd was caught in the middle. Who has the power—the producer because she has the money, the director because he’s directing the thing, the playwright because he wrote it or the star, James Earl Jones, because he’s onstage? Two days before we opened, Lloyd announced they had reached an impasse. Lloyd wasn’t going against his playwright, so he was stepping down. We were not going to open. We all stood up and begged for a compromise but left that evening not knowing what was going to happen. We were called in the following day and August announced to the cast that he and Ms. Hays had come to an understanding about the ending of the play, Lloyd agreed to stage it, and the play opened. It was an instant hit!

  In spite of the demands it placed on everyone, Fences became one of the biggest hits in Broadway history. The play opened March 27, 1987. In May it was nominated for six Tony Awards. In addition to doing the show, there was a monthful of luncheons, when the nominated actors and actresses got to meet the Tony Award voters. So my days were taken up and the shows were pressure-packed because the Tony voters were in the audience. I was stressed out wondering if I was good enough. There was too much personal pressure and life pressure. And to perform well, I can’t eat too much. I lost about fifteen pounds—I almost wasted away. It was a grueling experience.

  Now, all of a sudden I had to figure out how to maintain my energy for eight performances a week, night after night for ten straight months. I had two shows on Wednesdays, two on Saturdays, and Monday was my day off. Even though my training at Yale involved long days and many all-nighters, I hadn’t worked as hard as I’d have to work in the play. It was exhausting! And nobody can tell you how to do it; you have to figure it out yourself. Plus, my role was very emotional. Every night Corey had to cry and mourn his father’s death. Some nights I was as dry as a bone. But if I got my B.A. from Harvard and my M.F.A. from Yale, Fences earned me my Ph.D. I had to learn how much energy to use—to expend the exact amount of energy I needed: no less, no more.

  Fences won every major award that year: Best Play, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Featured Actor, Best Featured Actress, Best Script, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, a bunch of other awards—everything. Frankie and I were both nominated for Best Featured Actor. It was great but the process was stressful. Frankie would ask me, “Gosh, Courtney, you’re on top. What are you so worried about?” Unfortunately, Frankie and my votes canceled each other out. But I won the Clarence Derwent Award, which recognizes outstanding debuts in a Broadway play.

  With all the attention, my immaturity became a bigger issue. Everyone was saying, “Oh, Courtney, you’re so wonderful,” and I would believe them. People would recognize me as I took the subway back and forth to Brooklyn; they’d recognize me when I was on my bike. I wasn’t seeking out the attention and I was out and about among the folk. That early–August Wilson era was the first time black folks had any reason to come see a play in a long time. I was new at dealing with my “celebrity quotient.”

  “Didn’t I run into you the other day? Oh, at Fences! You were in Fences!”

  “Yeah, I’m in Fences.”

  “Oh, maan!”

  By August, I had hit my stride and onstage I knew how to give people their money’s worth without overextending myself. My time management and emotional management were no longer major issues. That month also marked contract renegotiations, which occur five months into any Broadway play. We had to decide if we were going to re-up for another six months. I was excited because I thought it meant I’d be making more money; we were making the Broadway minimum, which Ahren and I were banking. In the meantime, the producer had made back her investment five months into the run (and about thirteen million dollars overall). Now, the producer relies on the general manager to tell her how to deal with the actors. The general manager makes his money by keeping the show running tight in every area, including financially. James Earl earned a percentage and rightly so; he was the star. The GM told the rest of us, “There’s no increase. Take it or leave it!” He knew there was no place else for black theater actors to go. Our understudies were talented and would be happy to take our places. I was outraged.

  “Ahren, I want to leave the play. This is ridiculous!”

  She encouraged me to do some soul-searching and talk to the other actors. I spoke with Frankie, Ray, Charlie—the other members of our “family.” Everyone encouraged me, “Stick with it, brother, you can’t leave.”

  “But it’s not right!”

  “Just bite the bullet. Just hang. It’s wrong but there will come another day.”

  It was a big business lesson for me. Fences taught me acting lessons, business lessons and life lessons. Sometime in the midst of the run, Hamburger Hill opened. I couldn’t attend the premiere because I was doing the show—what an amazing time!

  While all this was going on, Ahren auditioned and was cast for August Wilson’s third play, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, which I consider his masterwork—it was a very difficult play, which is why it’s so rarely done. It’s slippery. When Lloyd wasn’t present (he’d often have to travel back to Yale), the cast would sometimes lose hold of it. Nevertheless, I was so happy for Ahren. She deserved it. Once again, I felt like we were doing this “acting thing” together. Wherever Joe Turner played I traveled to see her. I ended up seeing the play about twenty different times. Ahren was fabulous—she was outstanding onstage. Many people describe August Wilson plays as similar to the musical style the blues. His characters are people we all know in life. He infuses them with so much veracity that the actor has to be very closely cast. If the actor isn’t able to flesh out the character—if she doesn’t hit her exact right note at the exact right time—the audience will know it. Ahren was pure honesty in the play. She sang her note to perfection! The rest of the Joe Turner family was fabulous as well. I particularly remember noting how Charles Dutton was just energy personified—he’s unlike anyone else. And Angela Bassett was a force of nature coming onstage two hours into the play and totally changing its direction. Her role was very difficult, and I told her as much. I liked traveling to see Ahren. It made me feel good. As supportive as she had been to me, it was the least I could do.

  Joe Turner reached Broadway in March 1988. It, too, was nominated for a bunch of Tony Awards. Three of the women in the cast were nominated for Best Featured Actress. Ahren was one of them. We had both become Tony Award nominees. It was amazing! We came along at an incredible time to be a black theater actor (or theatergoer). August Wilson plays became a chance for black folks to gather on Broadway. That had never happened before—at least not in recent history for straight drama. (Musicals like Sophisticated Ladies, Dreamgirls and Tap Dance Kid had done well.) But at the opening of Fences, Ma Rainey—and, over a total of twenty years at Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, The Piano Lesson, Two Trains Running, Seven Guitars, King Hedley II, the revival of Ma Rainey and Gem of the Ocean—black actors would gather. Each premiere became a de facto reunion of August Wilson alumni. We had spent two or three years working together and touring the country before our play arrived on Broadway. These openings became a chance to reconnect. They were characterized by shrieks of joy, hugs, kisses, lipstick on cheeks and soulful hugs and handshakes. “What’s up! How are you? How’s your life? I miss you. You’re getting married? I admired your performance! Are you finding work as an actor? Did you hear so-and-so is expecting a baby?” We laughed, we cried, we ran lines together. Each
“family” was very, very tight. Other actors would show up to enjoy amazing theater and celebrate. Black actors may have competed against each other as we vied for the few theater, television and movie roles offered us, yet we shared in each other’s triumphs and tragedies. Over the miles we supported and encouraged and rooted for each other.

  This system that Lloyd set up and August delivered on became a testament to family—most visibly a testament to black family since our sudden presence on Broadway became glaringly obvious. But over the years, many, many regional theaters and community and equity actors of all races and around the nation became part of Lloyd’s system and, therefore, our extended clan. Lloyd and August have since passed and the world has lost one of the greatest director and playwright teams. But what he and Lloyd set in motion will reverberate for generations.

  Fences’ Broadway run closed in 1988. After that we performed in some regional theaters. I’ll always remember that when the play was in L.A., I experienced my first earthquake. Ahren, Bottom and I were in bed asleep when it happened. The tremor woke us up. Ahren called out and reached for both of us. We were literally shaken up but there for each other. In 1989, I auditioned and got a role in Athol Fugard’s My Children! My Africa! My Children got a mixed review, but the review I got from Frank Rich, the New York Times theater critic, was absolutely stunning. I don’t read reviews, but Ahren told me to read this one after she read it. It waxed on for about a column and a half.