Friends: A Love Story

by Angela Bassett

  After the appointment was over we were definitely open to the idea. I mentioned it to my mom. She was against it. I really couldn’t even talk to her about it. Fortunately, her lovely son-in-law explained the whole deal to her and she heard him. It was wonderful. I don’t know what his mom said, but she must have been all right with it. Anyhow, I wasn’t ready to do anything with any of the information. So I just let it go and sat on it for a couple of months.

  Well, after a while Courtney being Courtney, he started chompin’ at the bit. He had already come to find out that with me timing is everything. He’s come to know that I’m feeling it out, feeling it out, slowly mulling it over. Eventually he brought the subject back up.

  “Babe, what’s happening?”

  “Um, I don’t know….”

  It was still a very fresh idea to me. I felt I had more to learn. And I was wondering if this was the right organization to work with. It was the first place but was it the right place?

  “Let’s talk to somebody else, let’s talk to another place,” I suggested. I figured the more times you talk about it maybe different things will come up, different considerations; something another person didn’t bring up that could make a difference. And it’s a very expensive proposition. Having your own baby costs a certain amount. But when you’re hiring a surrogate, there are all kinds of things to consider. If she has twins, it’s more; if she has a C-section, it’s more; she needs insurance; you both need lawyers to keep things nice and clean; you want a maid to come clean her house; she needs a wardrobe for maternity; she has to go to the doctor; if she and/or her husband take days off from work, you want to compensate them—that kind of thing. Adoption was much, much cheaper.

  In the meantime I kept praying. One of the women in my prayer group at church offered to be our surrogate. My assistant at the time offered to carry for us. They were so sweet. We never considered taking them up on it, but I was touched; my heart was warmed by their compassion, their sincerity, woman to woman.

  That December 2004 we took part in the Kennedy Center Honors, the lifetime achievement awards for people in the performing arts, that takes place at the Kennedy Center in Washington. That year the awards were honoring James Earl Jones, whose performance when I was fifteen lit the spark for my career. Courtney was asked to participate in the program, as were Charles Dutton and Kelsey Grammar. Before the ceremony the three of them spent a little time together getting their parts right. I remembered that I’d read someplace that Kelsey and his wife had had a baby by surrogacy.

  Later I asked Courtney, “Would you feel comfortable calling Kelsey and asking him what company they went through?”

  “Sure, babe!”

  Kelsey was kind enough to talk to us. He referred us to another surrogacy organization. Whereas the first was a more boutique “mom and pop,” this place was more corporate—“We’ve been doing it from the beginning.” We talked to people who ran the company, couples who had been through the experience and women who had been surrogates. We met people whose opinions ranged from “We are helping you create your family” to the woman who quoted from the Bible: Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see (Hebrews 11:1).

  Our comfort level increased. I left feeling encouraged in my spirit, excited even. “Okay, we’re going to have faith. We’re going to have this baby!”

  We began to believe that maybe this was the way the Lord was blessing us. We had known of one way—traditional childbirth—but God knows of many ways. Maybe the old-fashioned way wasn’t the way; the Lord had something different in mind: adoption, surrogacy, maybe even somebody leaving a baby on our doorstep. I started telling more people what we were thinking, to see how they would react. I talked to my college roommate and told her what was going on.

  “Mary was Jesus’ surrogate mother.”

  “Oh, my gosh! I had never thought of that.” I’m not trying to compare myself to Mary or our children to Jesus. But the idea that Mary had carried a child that was not her own made me feel more comfortable.

  Eventually we decided to go for it.

  At the company we selected to manage the process for us, you don’t just select your surrogate, they have to choose you, too. (Another girlfriend of mine had a different experience. She was given the files of ten different surrogates to look through. She chose the woman.) Courtney and I had to put together a book that told our story, which the company would present to the potential surrogates. It became our little production. Courtney began to write out our story. I thought the first draft was a little heavy duty, a little too “I love the Lord!” I thought it might put somebody off; you don’t know who your surrogate is going to be. So I worked on it and shaped it a little bit. I wanted them to know that God is important in our lives, but I thought they should see more of who we are as people. I had fun selecting the right book, going through our pictures and trying to make them match the text, almost like a silent movie. Then I made five copies—four for whoever would get them and one for us to keep, that’s a part of our history. We’ll share it with our children. Then we anxiously waited. We didn’t get any information about what was going on—until we learned a couple had chosen us.

  Now, meeting your surrogate family is a very, very interesting and surreal experience. It’s very, very intimate. It’s hyper-intimate. You don’t even know them, yet you need them so much. They’re going to carry your baby and then give it to you and go back to their lives, yet they even don’t know you. Ours was a first-time surrogate, married and already a mother. (To protect their privacy, I’ll call the couple Stephanie and Kevin.) I don’t know how Stephanie was feeling, but I was very nervous. What do you talk about with someone who you don’t know but who might make your most precious dream come true? What do you say to someone you don’t know whose baby you’re willing to carry then part with because you’re that giving, that loving, because you know that you’ve been blessed?

  Stephanie was very quiet and sincere. Kevin was very kind. They were very, very, very kind and sweet.

  “Have you ever done this before?” I asked them.

  “It’s our first time,” Stephanie answered.

  “What makes you want to do it?”

  “We love our children. I love being a mother. We’ve been blessed to have children and to be able to be parents. We’d like to share our blessing.”

  “Wow…. You’re amazing people. That’s incredible.”

  “What would you expect from us afterward?” Courtney asked. Relationships with surrogates can look many ways. Some families stay in touch with each other, others send occasional photos, others never see each other again.

  “Oh, we don’t expect anything. It would be nice to see pictures of your family from time to time—how it turns out, how the children grow.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t have to worry about that,” I laughed. “We’ve got Mr. Shutterbug here. You’ll definitely see some pictures.”

  It was incredible to me that in Stephanie’s spirit all she wanted was to help someone. It takes an incredibly, incredibly special person to do something like that. It’s beyond my imagination. Thankfully, Stephanie and Kevin selected us.

  Now while all this was going on, Courtney had been having a dialogue with John Guare, author of Six Degrees of Separation and one of the most accomplished playwrights in the country, about performing in a play, His Girl Friday, a movie from 1940, at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, one of the foremost regional theaters in the country. At some point it came up that I would be perfect as the character Hildy. Courtney mentioned the possibility to me, but he knows it takes me a while to read something unless you tell me it’s starting next week. So we all got together for lunch—Courtney, me, John and Joe Dowling, who I’d never met before but who had been running the Guthrie for the past seven or eight years. They were delightful and fun and I decided I wanted to do the play. Courtney and I were going to spend the summer in Minneapolis!

  Of course, Courtney and I had never worked
together before and were very excited to do so for the first time. We discussed what it meant to be working together as a married couple and came to some agreements. We wanted to provide the best possible model of Christian love and respect and cooperation. We were determined not to give them any marital drama whatsoever. And I resolved that I was not going to try to direct my husband.

  Once we arrived at the Guthrie, we saw that Joe had assembled a phenomenal cast. Minneapolis is a theater town—they appreciate the theater, they love theater. If you’re an actor you can make a living in Minneapolis. In fact, I learned that one of my drama-school classmates, Izzy Monk, is just beloved there. I’m sure the other actors had probably seen us in films and on TV and may have been thinking, “lazy actors!” It’s a whole lot harder to do theater than television or film. Onstage, you’ve gotta get it right the first time; there is no “take two.” But even though Courtney and I hadn’t been onstage in years, we were going to work as hard as they did and be up to the task and surprise them. We could have shown up as celebrities and rented a house, gotten a maid and acted all grand. Instead, we took it back to our regional theater days. We just wanted to get back to our roots and just work. “This is the housing for actors right across the street for the theater? Okay, that’s where we want to stay.” But since we were two different actors, we did ask for two separate apartments.

  So it was a good time. But it was stressful—good stressful—especially for Courtney. He was the star of the play, the engine of the piece. He needed to have a high level of energy and intensity and focus. My role wasn’t as important as his, though I had to gun it, too. The play is a lot about rhythm and pace. The dialogue is quick, quick, quick. You finish each other’s sentences. I mean, to the point you are just out of breath! Once Courtney and I started working together we discovered that we were a little different. Courtney is the studious type. Of course, he had a lot to memorize—the play was two hundred pages and they were shaping and cutting and taking away lines and adding new lines. He claims I have a photographic memory, but I think it just comes a little easier to me. I could sit up and watch Entertainment Tonight and get my lines. I’d go to bed at ten and leave him working. But when I’d get up, there he’d be—still studying. Poor thing. I felt so sorry for him! I’d want to run lines with him but that wasn’t the way he studied. He had such a hard time for the first several weeks.

  The apartment across the hall from me seemed like his little prison cell. I wasn’t sure we were going to have enough time to get it together before we were in front of an audience. Still, I knew he’d done three-character plays where you don’t have twenty-five other people to take the heat, take up some of the words, and plays where he’d had to do South African accents and things. So I knew he was up to it. He just wasn’t ready to run lines yet, though I would have liked to be able to do our lines together—for him to just be able to run them with me so I could hear another voice and know my response. We also thought about our workday differently. I’d have liked to rehearse in the evening so I would have had a little preparation before I went in with the other actors the next day. I wanted to get to tomorrow’s work tonight. Courtney does the opposite. The work he does onstage that day, he wants to revisit in the evening. Tomorrow’s work he wants to worry about tomorrow. He greets the day and starts from there.

  Even though I promised myself I wasn’t going to direct him, as soon as I got there, I was like, “Courtney, I think you should…”

  “Angela, you promised not to do that!”

  “Oops!” He done shut me up. My feelings were a little hurt. I wanted to shut my own self up. Instead, all I could say was, “Yep! I know you’re right.”

  Three weeks or so into the process something clicked for him. He started to get it.

  And I could say in a more supportive tone, “You know what, Courtney? You did that with this and that was great. But I was thinking this other thing. What do you think? Am I crazy?” I could help my husband be his best, and he could hear me, and it could turn out okay.

  Opening night before we went onstage, I remember I was in my dressing room putting on my false eyelashes. Courtney came into the room. He was so dedicated, he had been at the theater for two or three hours getting warmed up, drinking tea, doing his Linkletter freeing-the-voice vocal exercises. You’re only required to be there thirty minutes early. I might get there an hour early. We said a prayer that we all have a great performance, that it’s a great night in the theater for everyone. Then he’d start rocking back and forth with his towel around his neck. He’s gotta pump up his energy because that’s the way his character is—he bursts onto the scene making deals and twisting the truth. Then maybe twenty minutes into the play Hildy—my character—would show up. I’d have this fantastic red suit, red coat, red hat, red purse and heels. I had the 1940s thing down—the cigarette, movements I don’t usually make, the hands on the hip, the banter, the je ne sais quoi. I remember feeling aware of my body, my voice and the audience. I would look across at Courtney. I’d see him with his hair conked—processed—that pencil-thin mustache, that 1940s suit. And for a quick flash of a second I might see him working and hear the audience laughing and think in passing, I love to work with Courtney! But then he’d have so much energy that he would jump on my line—cut me off too soon. Then I’d think, “Courtney, you’d better cut that out! Look at the script.” It was hard work, but it was gratifying. We were just in awe every day. After all of the challenges we’d faced early on in our marriage, we had loved each other and ourselves and worked through them. We had worked through our differences in how we worked as actors. We learned how to approach our parts separately yet meld and come together. We learned how to accept each other’s uniqueness. And now we were working together. We were in awe and it was brilliant! It was brilliant!

  Night after night the audience loved the play. The audiences in Minneapolis are so appreciative and so savvy. It didn’t matter that Courtney and I were black and playing in roles from the 1940 movie starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. They paid their money. They bought the seats. The lights went down, we told them the way it was and they agreed. They bought it. They believed it. And that’s what theater is all about: transporting belief. Opening night, Izzy came to the show. So did Sharon Reich, one of my freshman-year roommates. Today she is a doctor at the University of Minnesota. I got to meet her husband and daughter.

  Meanwhile, back in California, our surrogate was going through the process of preparing herself to get pregnant. We knew the process was in capable hands—hers and the doctors’. One, two or three occasions Courtney and I had to ask for a break in our rehearsal schedule to participate in activities related to our surrogate. When the doctor places the embryo in the surrogate, we participated by conference call. I’d been through that process before and knew it was private and that we wouldn’t be in the room anyhow. Courtney wasn’t even in the room when I did it. But we could have our voices there in the room so we could talk to Stephanie and support her. We could all talk to each other. That was good. We had been told the odds—there was only a sixty percent chance that each egg would work out positively, so we had agreed to implant two embryos. But at the last minute the doctor said he was going to implant three embryos to increase our odds.

  “You’ve been through so much,” he said, “I want to put in three to give you the best chance.”

  We had already agreed we were going with two. She was younger than me. You’re supposed to have babies in your twenties, so her uterine lining was thicker than mine. We figured we’d have the doctor put in two and see what we get. We’d either get none, one or two—unless one or both of the embryos split, in which case we could get three or four. It’s rare, but it has happened. So we had all discussed this from the beginning and agreed upon two. We were all clear. None of us wanted to do more than that. Now at the last minute, the doctor was talking about three. We were caught off guard. She didn’t want to try to carry three. And we didn’t want to make the decision of—the
y call it selection—decreasing the number by aborting one. We just couldn’t do that. Our beliefs wouldn’t let us do that. We’d wanted children for so long, we couldn’t just say, “Okay, now we’re getting rid of one of them.” You don’t know who you’d be getting rid of.

  We started to defer to his expertise.

  “What are the odds of all three taking?”

  “You only have a five percent chance.”

  “But if that happens it’s like a hundred percent.” I was just so emotional. I was leaning toward giving in to this professional who’s been through this and knows we’re not going to end up with triplets. Because as he said, “Triplets are nobody’s friend.” He was just for putting them in and getting one or two.

  With hesitancy, I said, “Okay…” We stayed on the phone and the doctor talked to us as he performed the procedure so we could hear what was going on.

  Stephanie said, “We said only two. Two only!” She was worrying that maybe she might hurt our feelings, but it was a relief.

  I told her, “Yes, yes, yes! Thank you! Thank you! Somebody had to have the presence of mind to make a good decision.” Because all we wanted was two. We didn’t want more. “Thank you for being stronger and remembering what our first conversation was. Let’s go ahead with that.”