Friends: A Love Story

by Angela Bassett

  The walls in this office were paper thin. Sometimes when this happens you get a little preview, you hear what happens. “That doesn’t sound believable,” or “Hmm…she really put her foot in it.” You can get a little intimidated or feel more confident. I didn’t know who the person auditioning was—I was certain she would be better than me. Yet I was hoping I could put my own twist on the lines. Like we were all wearing the same blue pinstriped suit, but maybe I’d made the lining of mine shocking red or canary yellow. It’s still a little pinstriped blue suit but—it’s got a little flare. But as the woman started acting and I listened to how she performed the role, I felt like there was room for me to shine.

  When I was called into the audition room, I again met Ruben, who was very nice, along with Doug Chapin, one of the producers who had bought the rights to the book and shepherded it along to this point. I read with Ruben. Ruben is a great casting director but he’s not an actor; he didn’t have an actor’s instincts. Regardless, I had to read as if he did. I had to imagine that he was an actor, I had to imagine that he was Ike. We did about three or four scenes. The last one was very hard and required emotional volatility. There was no lead-up time; it was just turn on a dime. The scene changed in a nanosecond—lightning split, quick, emotional changes, transitions! If Ruben had been an actor, he might have done some things with his voice or perhaps with gestures to threaten me. He was just the reader, but in my mind, in my imagination, I invested Ruben with every bit of violence and intimidation that I could muster. Tina had been afraid and in love and fighting for her life and making up and backpedaling. I reacted to Ruben’s—Ike’s—words as if he was about to kill me! I fell on the floor. Tears shot out of my eyes. In that moment I was there—not outside, not looking in, not removed from it. Ike was real.

  “Whatchu say? Whatchu gonna do?”

  The scene may have been one page long or one page and a quarter. Boom! It was quick. Quick! But when we finished I had to get up and wipe the tears off my face. I knew I had “put my foot in it!” as they say—I had performed incredibly well. I thought, “Oh, girl, I surprised myself. Oh, my gosh, I showed up for that one! Aww, that take was sweet. Give me another helping, please!” It doesn’t get any better than that. They should have been filming. I wish I were in costume. Any lights, camera, action!

  Later I would learn that that was the moment when everyone in the room said, “We found her!” At the time, all I knew was that I was satisfied but that other people still had to audition and were scheduled to come in. The gossip on the grapevine was asking, “Is Tina going to do it?” The director was married to Lynn Whitfield. In my mind, that made her a shoo-in for the role; I didn’t know they had broken up. I remember thinking that Robin Givens still hadn’t auditioned. She was doing lots of movies back then; she was the black “it” girl. Women my age still had to audition and the young Tinas still had to audition. All were wonderful actors. The production team may have felt I was the one, but they still had to be sure, they had to be fair. Like everyone else I waited until the auditions were finished.

  But when I got the call that they liked me, it wasn’t because I had been awarded the part. I was told that the people I had auditioned in front of didn’t have the final authority to hire me. Disney execs would have the final say. I would have to participate in a screen test. Unlike an audition where there’s no scenery or props, for a screen test they try to give the actors and the audience evaluating the actors a fair approximation of what’s going on so there’s much less left to the imagination. They construct a set and light it properly. The actors wear costumes, act and are actually filmed.

  When I was asked to screen-test, I had a good feeling that some established player had not already been cast, as is sometimes the case. The role was really available; however, being screen-tested was new to me. I didn’t know how it worked. They had offered Ike to Laurence Fishburne. He had turned it down—it was Tina Turner’s story and he didn’t know who was going to play Tina. He eventually did. From Disney’s perspective, who was I? I was somebody coming up, but not a household name. I might have been fine playing roles on television, but now I would have to carry a feature film. Whether I was a household name or not, did I have enough presence to carry Tina’s story? The folks in the audition room thought so, but what about the folks who were putting up the money? What about Touchstone? What about the legion of Ike and Tina fans? They didn’t know who I was. Sheryl Lee Ralph, who starred in Dreamgirls, was also invited to screen-test. They knew she could actually act, sing and dance.

  In between the audition and the screen test, I worked with Michael Peters, the movie’s choreographer, to learn dance steps, and dialect coach Jessica Drake to learn Tina’s accent. I also had to learn my lines for the screen test with Keith David and SamuelL. Jackson, the two guys who were up for the role of Ike after Laurence decided to pass. For about two weeks straight, I worked about fourteen hours a day learning a role I hadn’t been cast in and wasn’t being paid for. I had a major attitude!

  “I don’t have this job, yet I’m working like I’ve got this job.”

  “Oh, Angela, how many hours would you like to work?” Brian Gibson, the director, would ask.

  “Ten hours, doggone it—ten hours a day!”

  But ten hours was not enough to accomplish everything we needed to get done, which was to learn lines, act and dance for five or six long scenes. We were going to perform “Proud Mary”—you know, “rollin’ on the river.” We were going to perform Ike and Tina’s first meeting. We were going to perform the scene when Ike got upset with Tina for talking about the new music she thought they ought to play, then beat and raped her.

  “Just feel confident. You’re really wonderful,” everyone would reassure me. “It’s just got to go through what it’s got to go through. Disney needs the screen test to put their stamp of approval on it. We want you to be the best you can be.” I was ticked off but kept on going. I was trying to come up in my field and was willing to put up with whatever was necessary to get there. I wasn’t in shape. I was constantly tired. My body was sore and achy.

  On the day of the film test, they placed me in one trailer and Sheryl in another. I heard that she had only gotten about three days to prepare. I had gotten two weeks with Michael Peters. Knowing that made me feel more confident since I was competing against a real pro. We each spent an hour or two in hair and makeup. Then for about twelve or fourteen hours we’d perform the scenes. I’d do my scene; she’d do her scene. Then I’d do a scene and she’d perform the same scene. In between scenes, the crew would change the set. We were in the house, so they made it look like a house, with a sofa, a vacuum cleaner and whatever. We were in a diner, so they made it look like a diner. We did “Proud Mary,” with the hair, yellow dress, lip-synching and klieg lights. We did the young Anna Mae Bullock, the older Anna Mae, the beat-up Anna Mae, Tina in all her glory—the Proud Mary “rollin’ on the river” Tina. During the rape scene, Sam Jackson accidentally fractured my hand dragging me across the room. By the time we were done, it felt like we had performed the whole movie. The studio executives told us they’d let us know in thirty days and we would start filming one week later.

  Thirty days? And then a week to prepare to play this lead role? That was outrageous. Fortunately, it didn’t happen. Later that weekend I learned I had gotten the part. I would have thirty days to prepare. A month was a lot better than a week, but still just awful! It wasn’t enough time. But you know what? Black folks have been asked to do so much with so little for so long. And here’s the grandness and the shame of it: We do it—it gets done! So what does that perpetuate? More of the same; more doing much with little in a very little amount of time.

  At this point, I had been cast as the female lead but there was still no word about the male. Around that time, I traveled to New York to attend the movie premiere of Malcom X and saw Laurence while I was on an escalator. I knew they wanted him to play Ike. The director had told me, “I had this dream and I saw the ma
rquis. Laurence Fishburne and Angela Bassett were starring in this movie.” Even though Laurence had already said no, they kept asking him anyway. So when he saw me, he had a look on his face like he expected me to bug him about something his mind was already made up about—like he expected me to say, “Man, why don’t you want to come do this with me? It’s going to be fabulous. Come on!” But I figured everybody’s got a dream, something they want to do, and some people are really good at getting everyone to help them make their dreams come true. But what about their desires, their aspirations? Don’t pressure folk and don’t get your feelings hurt if other people don’t catch your fever, too. You’ve got to consider, What do they want to do?

  So I shouted from the escalator, “Hey! They keep talking about you, but I told them to leave you alone. You’re grown. You know what you want and don’t want to do. They should just leave you alone about it!”

  It wasn’t like I had some reverse-psychology ulterior motive. I’m not that smart. I just didn’t want to pressure him. I figure if folks don’t want to do something, move on; you’ve gotta give them an easy way out.

  But a couple of days later the telephone rang, and a deep resonant voice asked, “So you want to get married?”

  “Whaat? Yeah!” I shouted. “This is gonna be fun! I’m gonna get a chance to work with you again. We’re really going to work together on this one!”

  Who knows what convinced Laurence to take the role. Maybe he had seen a more recent revision of the script, so he knew it was gonna be all right. Maybe he thought, Angela’s doing it. She’s good. She’s cool. Let me come support her. He had been acting since he was ten or so and had been in a number of different movies—Cornbread, Earl and Me, Apocalypse Now, School Daze, Cadence. But he was still looking for a starring role. As he said, back then people couldn’t put his face and his name together, which is what, as an actor, you want them to be able to do. This movie wasn’t starring the man—and people were going to be talking bad about Ike. But the script was really a two-hander. It needed someone who could do it all in the span of a two-hour movie. You had to be attracted to him—his charisma—yet he had to inspire fear. You had to be drawn in and repelled by him. Laurence just embodied that. He had it all.

  Once Laurence accepted, I’m sure they paid him waay more than I got, though that’s neither here nor there. Their first offer to me was fifty thousand dollars. I knew that wasn’t fair. I had gotten that playing in Dessa Rose. My righteous indignation sprang up. We settled on two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which was pretty standard for a newer, up-and-coming actor asked to carry the load.

  “This is going to be a breakout role for her,” the movie executives said.

  I was happy. I had a lead in an important movie and I had never made that kind of money before. I thought, “Let’s do this thing, let’s make it happen.”

  Chapter 8

  Making a Life With It

  I continued auditioning for other roles, and Six Degrees opened to rave reviews. Before long, I got a phone call. James had decided to leave the play to do a television series. I was in shock! Could it be possible?

  “They’re offering it to me?” I asked my agent.

  “No, it’s between you and Andre Braugher.”

  “Oh, not again!”

  “Yeah, you guys have to audition again. The director, Jerry Zaks, was feeling nervous because he and James had not gotten along well during the rehearsal. Their personalities didn’t mix.” Since I knew Andre would be fierce competition, my agent thought it would be a good idea to leverage a film I was up for to help me get the role.

  “Don’t you dare!” I told her. “Jerry’s already skittish—he’s already had one bad experience. Don’t make him think that I’d try to force him to do something.”

  “Courtney, I think—”

  “Take me out of the film! I want to do the play.” I knew Six Degrees was a masterwork. I knew if I got seen in it, my performance would bring me movies.

  “But, Courtney…”

  “Take me out and tell Jerry I’d like to sit down and talk.” I felt that if I could talk to him, he’d like me and see that I’m very easy to get along with.

  “Okaay…”

  So she set up the meeting and as I expected, we loved each other. He said, “Okay, Courtney, go see the play and if you like it, then let’s do this thing.”

  A few nights later I sat backstage in the Mitzi Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, watching the play with the stage manager from his perch near the lights directly above the stage.

  This is amazing! I thought. I wondered what exactly I was seeing that made it so superb: Was it the acting? The directing? I asked Jerry soon thereafter and he let me know that it was a very tightly directed play. I was hooked!

  But there seemed to be something missing in how James approached the way the character Paul drew in the family into his web of lies. I thought Paul was completely improvising, as he was living life on the edge, and this should have manifested itself in a slightly higher energy level than James exhibited as he played him. I thought his performance left unanswered the question “Why didn’t the family kick him out?” So for five weeks beginning sometime in July 1990, Jerry and I began to explore that fine line of possibility. The role was very slippery to me. Sometimes I’d have my arms around it then it would slide right out of my grasp. But that slipperiness fit the character. He was on edge. He was lost and unmoored and making things up as he went along. “Will you be my family? Will you be my mom and dad?”

  John Guare plays are very difficult to do. They have a very specific rhythm and he does not allow you to improvise. During rehearsals, sometimes I’d be saying my lines and lose my place. Sometimes the words would slip my mind. And in performance I’d remember the rhythm but not the lines, so I’d say gibberish until the words came back to me. My cast members, who during the performance would sit in the first row, would laugh and howl. “Oh, Courtney, you’re so funny!” They didn’t understand how shy I was, that I was completely frightened, how much work it takes me to stand onstage in front of over 1,400 people—or how close I was to walking off the stage. For I, too, was on edge. I was playing the role of a man on a tightrope, and I felt I was walking a tightrope, as well. The entire play hinged on my performance, but the role was so complex it hadn’t yet taken up residence in my body and spirit. An acting role will eventually settle into my body’s muscle memory so I no longer have to think my way through it. When that happens nothing can throw me. But I wasn’t there, and wouldn’t be for seven or eight months. The smallest thing—my costar missing a line, someone’s cough, an audience member arriving late—could cause me to lose my rhythm. The play was being moved to a larger theater—the Vivian Beaumont—also in the Lincoln Center, and also on Broadway.

  The night the play reopened with me in it, it was rereviewed. We got a good review, which basically focused on me since I was the element that had changed. In the meantime, the young man that the story was based on was walking around town telling people that Six Degrees was his play—that he had written it. So when I’d come onstage the audience members would be asking each other if this wasn’t a masterwork but a rip-off. From the first time I came in, my focus had to be strong enough not to be defeated by what people were thinking—not to mention, my own fear.

  Six Degrees became a tremendous success, but for a long time playing Paul took everything I had. Even though the show didn’t start until about eight o’clock at night, I’d start getting anxious about it at about one in the afternoon. At about four I’d leave home to catch the subway so I could get there by five. For the next three hours I would read my notes—things I needed to tweak, change or improve—then I’d walk through every moment, every word, every beat of the show in my dressing room, by myself. I had to do that to integrate the changes and build up my self-confidence each night. If I didn’t do that, I was so shy and insecure, I’d never have been able to go onstage. After the show, I’d either leave the theater at about ten and go
straight home, or call Ahren and invite her to join me for dinner or drinks with friends who had come to the show. The next day I’d be up at six-thirty to walk Bottom. Physically and emotionally, my life was totally exhausting.

  Around Thanksgiving of 1990 I learned that something was seriously wrong with my parents’ relationship. I knew Dad had been stressed out. He had worked his way up through the ranks at Chrysler, and when the company had financial problems during the late 1970s, he thought he saw a way out. He hoped that Chrysler would go under so he could leave with his benefits and start all over. I don’t know what he had in mind, but knowing my dad I’m sure he had a plan. But when Lee Iacocca was brought in and saved the company, my father was crushed. He felt trapped—like he couldn’t move on. He had bills to pay, and I was at Harvard. Of course, neither he nor my mother told me this at the time. Back then, Dad worked in the benefits department. The plant he worked at was retooling, so he was responsible for firing and rehiring three thousand employees. Later I’d learn that my mother’s sister Lois Ann had been talking to him and had encouraged him to leave for years.

  “The kids will understand, Conroy. Everything will be fine.”

  “No, I can’t do that to them,” my dad would tell her.