Friends: A Love Story

by Angela Bassett

  “Yeah, I’m good. You good?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, good, I’m glad.”

  “Okay. I just wanted to make sure you were all right.”

  “Okay.”

  “Talk to you later.”

  That was it. I walked out into the street and told Tony. “Can you believe it?”

  I don’t know whose idea it was or who made the first call—I think maybe I called her—but a few months later we agreed to meet for tea at a little spot on Melrose Avenue and test the waters. I didn’t know if I would have romantic feelings toward her, but I definitely didn’t want any romantic feelings I might have to enter into things. I let her set the pace. We had a nice, gentle, respectful, catching up kind of time. We talked about all kinds of things, and she got to see the new me in action.

  “You’re having an emotional conversation, Courtney?”

  I didn’t shirk from the difficult questions. Just to sit and talk was all I wanted. But though I was cool on the outside, on the inside I was thinking, Lord, what are you doing here? What are you telling me?

  A couple of weeks later, we got together for tea again. It was nice. Again, I let her set the tempo. I figured we should only go as fast as she said or the Lord allowed. I was just happy to have a second chance to talk to her. It was beyond what I ever thought would ever happen again. By the time Ahren and I reconnected, Bottom’s hips were pretty much gone. He was a big dog and now he could barely walk. The doctors had done just about all they could do. When I traveled for work, I’d had to put together a whole network of friends and dog walkers and give them detailed instructions for how to take care of him. Ahren and I talked about that and reminisced about our good times with him. But there is only so much you can catch up on in two hours and I wanted to be able to talk more while remaining in a “safe” environment.

  “What if we took a drive?” I suggested about a month later. “We could pick a gorgeous day and just drive up the coast and come back.”

  “Okay. That would be nice.”

  We gently drove up the Pacific Coast Highway. It was a beautiful day and we were having a great time, so we didn’t worry about the clock and kept going.

  “It’s going to be dark when we get back,” I told her. “What do you want to do?”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Well, I know there’s this funky little hotel up here. Maybe we can get separate rooms and just continue to talk. No stress, no tension.”

  “Okay, that would be nice.”

  After all of the tough, ditch-digging work and soul-searching I’d done, I was thrilled—this was more than I could take. I would think, Lord, I don’t know what you’re doing but I’m grateful to be having a second chance. I’m having a great time. We spent the night in separate rooms in this very funky, famous pink hotel that reminded us of the Flintstones. We had the best time!

  We drove back to L.A. the next day. Everything was great and we went on with our lives. We weren’t in constant contact with one another. Every couple of months we would get together and do something casual. In the meantime, I just kept working, walking Bottom and paying attention to my dreams.

  In addition to Bottom’s hip problems, he was suffering from a host of other illnesses. He basically required 24-7 care. I just didn’t know what I was going to do. I couldn’t expect my dog-sitters to do everything I was doing for him. I knew I had to start thinking about putting him down. But how do you lay down a dog who’s been your child, your rhythm, your life? I remember talking to him: “Bottom, what are we going to do?” One afternoon I asked him where he wanted to lie—on the front lawn so he could lie in the sun and watch what was going on, or in the backyard where the grass was soft. He wanted to go out front, so we went and sat out front for a while, then I went back inside and kept peeking out at him. Toward the evening, he wanted to sit on the grass in the back. So we walked back there together then I went back in the house. I must have fallen asleep or forgotten that he was out there. All of a sudden I remembered, “Ohmygoodness, the sprinklers—Bottom can’t get up!” I ran into the backyard and was relieved to see him lying there chillin’; the sprinkers hadn’t come on yet. But I looked at him again. Something was wrong. Brown stuff was coming out of his mouth.

  “Bottom? Bottom!” He didn’t respond. I was frantic. I picked him up—ninety pounds of dead weight—and carried him to the car. I drove him to the animal emergency room and rang the bell. They came out and looked at him.

  “Is he going to be okay?”

  “Sir, he’s gone. He’s gone.”

  “Oh…”

  “We’ll keep him on ice until you decide what you’d like us to do with the body.”

  I sat there in shock. I didn’t know where to go. I didn’t know what to do. So I called Ahren and broke down.

  “Bottom’s dead! I don’t know what I’m going to do…”

  She and I talked. I realized he’d stayed around just long enough for Ahren and I to reconnect. And then he left. The circle was closed. Now he could move on. To comfort myself I volunteered to start walking Wren’s mom’s dog.

  One night a week or so later, I decided to get over my grieving and go hang out with some friends. I went out to the jazz club Catalina’s with some of my friends and Angela was there. We had a great time listening to the music, catching up and having fun. Afterward, as we stood outside shooting the breeze, it suddenly dawned on me: Angela’s not seeing anybody and I’m not seeing anybody. Maybe we should go out. So I asked, and she said yes.

  I don’t remember where we went or what we did—all I remember is the date being painful. It was a “quiet disaster.” What I’d envisioned was something casual—Court and Ang just hanging out. Instead, we both felt awkward. She’s shy, I’m shy and we didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t get it together. I kept thinking, She’s Angela—she’s my friend! What are we doing here? I wasn’t able to be cool, glib—nothing. I don’t even want to know what she was thinking of me. All I remember is pulling up to her house in my little station wagon and thinking, Okay, please leave so I can just go. I didn’t want the end of our date to make her wonder, Is he going to kiss me? Do we hug? What do we do? I thought, “Okay, Angela. Thanks so much, blah, blah, blah. Please let it end!”

  Afterward, to be polite, I sent some happy-birthday/sorry-for-the-lousy-date flowers to her on the set of Waiting to Exhale, which she had flown off to film in Phoenix. When I hadn’t heard back from her after a few days I called to make sure they’d arrived.

  “Hey, Angela! Did you get the flowers?”

  “Yeah, I got them. Thank you so much.” Then she launched into some drama about her living arrangements down there. I was so glad she changed the subject. I felt like I had a way out of an awkward conversation.

  “It sounds like you got a lot going on, girl,” I told her. “Okay, I’m gonna let you go.”

  I was just trying to be a friend and move on. I didn’t run into her again for a while.

  In the summer of 1995 one of my buddies asked me if I had heard about the auditions for a major role in the movie The Preacher’s Wife that would star Denzel Washington and Whitney Houston. I hadn’t heard anything about it from my agents, but I as soon as I brought it up to them I was able to get an audition and went through a whole series of callbacks. Penny Marshall, the director, wanted to find the right person to play Whitney’s on-camera husband, Reverend Henry Biggs. Between Whitney and Denzel, she had two big stars to work with. She wanted someone who was “steady,” who wouldn’t give her any “drama.” (I guess all that work on myself had paid off; I was being considered “steady”!) Eventually, I was called to her house in the Hollywood Hills. I knocked and rang the driveway buzzer, knowing it was a moment that could change my life.

  “Courtney! How ya doin’? Come on in!”

  Penny opened the door and greeted me in her distinct Penny Marshall “New Yawk” accent. We talked, and she showed me around her house. I could see that Penny and I got along and that we
wouldn’t have any problems working together. I’d won my first major, major movie role!

  That fall of 1995, before we started shooting, I finally decided to walk down that church aisle to the altar and give my life to the Lord. I had been going to the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem whenever I was in New York, and the church’s minister, Reverend Dr. Calvin O. Butts, was serving as our technical adviser for the film. The winds of change had been blowing in my life for a while. Before we began shooting, I realized that I didn’t want to play the role of a preacher and stand in a pulpit if I wasn’t baptized. I wanted to make a statement to myself and to the other people in the film that I was very serious about giving my life to the Lord. When I went down in the water, I had the most amazing experience. A shift happened. I didn’t know the Bible, I didn’t have any spiritual tools; yet I was being rinsed clean—I could feel it!

  We shot Preacher’s Wife for five months in and around New York during that winter. Everything went wonderfully. The movie was about a man realizing that his family is the most important thing in his life and that was necessary for him to reorder his life to make sure they remained first. That was exactly the kind of work I was doing in my own life. The whole movie was a metaphor for what was happening to me.

  One fun behind-the-scenes story involves the movie’s ice-skating scene. The scene could have been shot in Manhattan, but Penny wanted to travel to Maine, where she could guarantee that it would be cold. So we all went up to Maine and raided L.L.Bean and all the other winter stores so we’d have the latest woollies and cold-weather gear. I was very excited because I had grown up playing hockey in Detroit every Friday and Saturday night. I would finally get the chance to show off my skating skills in a movie.

  It was 20 degrees when we arrived in Maine. The crew had gotten there a good month earlier and put a foot and a half of water on the lake just in case the temperature went up. It was frozen solid and deep. But on the day of the shoot the temperature soared to 50 degrees and kept climbing. Denzel and Whitney were able to complete their scene, but by the time my part of the shoot came, the lake was mush. I was crushed! Denzel and Whitney couldn’t skate, yet they got the opportunity to skate on film; I knew how to skate, but my scene had to be cut. Thank God they saw fit to put that extra water on the lake, otherwise the whole day would have been ruined. Other than that little glitch, it was an important and wonderful shoot for me.

  When I returned to Los Angeles, Ahren and I had a couple more teas—a couple more get-togethers—but a couple of hours together didn’t seem to be enough.

  “Why don’t we drive up to Big Bear,” I suggested. So we decided to spend a weekend at the mountain resort, located about an hour and a half north of L.A. We decided to rent one of the big log cabins they have but stay in separate bedrooms. We didn’t know what was happening between us—we were getting to know each other again slowly. And it was good; it was easy and there was no pressure. We had a great time. By the end of the weekend, we were staying in the same suite but sleeping in separate beds.

  “Courtney, how do you feel about me? Do you feel attracted to me?” Ahren asked me. It was just a question. She had this way of getting right to the point but in a gentle way. I didn’t want to play games with her; we had both grown beyond that.

  “I don’t really know how to say this, Ahren, but right now I really don’t,” I told her honestly. “I’m not feeling any sexual tension or attraction. That doesn’t mean it won’t be there, but right now I’m just basking in the fact that we’re here. That’s more than enough right now.” After what we had been through, being in each other’s presence was a miracle in itself. It was a miracle!

  “Okay. Honest question, honest answer,” she said.

  I didn’t ask her how she felt; I didn’t really want to know. I liked that we were getting to know each other again slowly. Talking about whatever feelings she may have had for me would be moving too fast. Over the past few years, I had been forced to do what she’d told me to do, which was to let her heal. I’d focused on working on myself. Now, the Lord had brought our relationship back around. For what purpose, neither of us knew. But it sure felt good.

  The next day we had a blast, gigglin’, laughin’ and cleanin’ up after ourselves before we left—it was one of the best times we’d ever had.

  “Remember the last time we left somewhere?” she asked.

  “Wow, tears…” I recalled.

  But this time we were just laughin’ and squealin’. When we closed the door to the cabin we raced to the car and took off back down the hill.

  For the first time in our relationship I had been present with her. That left me feeling fulfilled. When we parted, we said, “Okay, I’ll talk to you soon.” There was no “What does this mean?” or “What are we doing?” We were just gently getting to know each other, slowly putting our toes in the water. We went back about our lives. I won parts in a couple of cable movies. I picked up golf. I was consoling myself about losing Bottom by walking Mama Bear’s—that’s what we called Wren’s mother—dogs.

  A few months later, early in the summer of 1996, I called Ahren up and asked her to go to a play with me. Having Our Say, the story of the hundred-year-old Delany sisters, was in town at the Taper Theater.

  “I’d love to come. But I’m hectic right now,” she told me. “Can I call you at the last minute and let you know?”

  “Absolutely. No problem.”

  At the last minute she called me up to tell me she couldn’t make it.

  There are times in our lives that turn out to be pivotal moments, when we make choices or walk through doorways through which we can never return. Unbeknownst to either one of us, Ahren’s decision not to join me at the play that evening would turn out to be one of them. To this day I don’t know what was going on in her life; I only know that she couldn’t come. I asked my buddy Henry Woronicz, my friend from the Boston Shakespeare Company, to go. He had been staying with my housemate and me for the past several months while he checked out the L.A. acting scene. When we arrived at the theater, I saw Angela milling around the front of the theater with Mama Bear.

  I didn’t know Angela knew Mama Bear, I thought. I didn’t even know Mama Bear was coming. She didn’t say anything about it this morning.

  Since Angela had blown up after starring in What’s Love Got to Do With It? and Waiting to Exhale, the photographers were all around her. I didn’t feel like getting caught up in all that so I figured I’d talk to them later. During the play’s two intermissions I got up and walked around looking for Angela and Mama Bear, but I didn’t see them. After the play ended, I kept my eyes open for them again, though I was more concerned about getting backstage. The Taper Theater is round and I didn’t know where the stage door was located. I was wondering where it was and hoping Hank wasn’t getting mad at me for taking so long, since it had been a three-hour play. I knew we were both exhausted, and I had to get up in a few hours to walk Mama Bear’s dogs.

  I was standing in front of the theater as people were streaming out, and suddenly Angela popped up in front of my face.

  “Lookin’ for me?”

  “Actually, yeah!”

  Gordon Davidson, the artistic director of the theater, popped up right next to her. He asked, “You guys going to the opening-night party?”

  I said, “No.”

  Angela said, “Yeah!” as if to answer for all of us.

  “I guess we’re going,” I said to myself. I wasn’t convinced we’d stay long, but given the artistic director’s invitation, I couldn’t say no. Backstage, we got to see our friends and tell them how much we liked the show.

  “You going to the party?” they asked us.

  I said, “No.”

  Angie looked at me and told them, “Yeah, we goin’.”

  I looked at Hank. He looked at me and shrugged. So I reluctantly said, “All right, let’s go.”

  When we got to the party, I started doing what I do. I got chairs for Angela and Mama Bear, got them coffee, set
up things for them, then stepped off to the side with Hank and away from all the commotion.

  “She’s nice,” Hank observed.

  “Who?”

  “Angela,” he said. “She’s nice, Court. You should date her.”

  “Hank, Hank. Please don’t do that to me. There’s history here. Please don’t put that in my mind…”

  “Courtney, she’s nice,” Hank repeated. “I think you should date her.”

  Now, where this was coming from? I wasn’t thinkin’ about Angela. I wasn’t lookin’ at her like that. She was just Angela—as sweet as can be—but I wasn’t lookin’ at her like that.

  “What about her?” Hank insisted.

  “No, no, no, Hank. I went on a date with her. She’s shy, I’m shy. It was ugly. I embarrassed myself.”

  “But, Courtney, she’s nice, you’re nice. You guys should date—that’s all I’m saying. I mean, come on,” he continued. “What’s the problem?”

  “Okay, Hank, okay. I hear you. I don’t know that I’m going to do anything about it, but I hear you.”

  So we did our thing. I talked to our friends. Then at about 2:00 a.m. I excused myself.

  “Okay, Mama Bear, we’re gonna check out. I’ll see you in the morning. I’ll call you five minutes before I get there.”

  Angie said, “For what?”

  “I’ll be there to walk her dogs.”

  “You’re gonna walk her dogs in the morning—it’s two o’clock now!” She stared at me in amazement.

  “Yeah…”

  “Will you marry me?” she asked and laughed.

  “Ah, yeah!”

  “You’re not going to change your mind, are you?”

  “Uh, no.”

  Hank and I got waylaid, so we didn’t leave right away. When we finally did start heading out, it was at the same time as Angela and Mama Bear.

  “Courtney, we’ve got to walk them to their car,” Hank reminded me.

  “Oh, right.”

  He nudged me the whole time we walked behind them.