Foxy

by Pam Grier

  Now I was spending more time in New York than in Los Angeles, and I liked the balance of work and social life. I dated some men here and there, but I chose not to get serious about anyone. My body was still healing, and I had no room to cater to anyone else. But I did date Warrington Hudlin, a Yale graduate and producing partner of his brother, Reginald Hudlin, a Harvard graduate. Warrington had a beautiful loft in the hip Meatpacking District in Manhattan, and I found him to be an intelligent man who shared my love of the martial arts. He introduced me to Chinese herbalist and Grand Martial Arts Master Doo Wai, who guided me in taking herbs, and watched over my diet, making sure my cancer did not return. Warrington also taught me a lot about film production. One day, when Warrington and I were both in Los Angeles, I was driving him to the Valley when we crossed Highland Avenue. There, as we idled in stalled traffic, I spotted a strange-looking man in shorts on the edge of the sidewalk. His long brown hair was unruly, he wore old sneakers, and he was talking to a gorgeous starlet-type young woman, all the while gesturing wildly.

  Warrington recognized this man as Quentin Tarantino, director and writer extraordinaire, fresh off his great success, Pulp Fiction. I was in awe just seeing him, until he looked straight at me. I saw the recognition in his eyes, and suddenly he was walking into the middle of traffic, heading toward my car. “Pam Grier,” he said, staring at me through my open window.

  I was stunned that he knew my name. “Yes. Mr. Tarantino. What a pleasure,” I cooed and introduced him to Warrington, a big fan. Quentin knew who the Hudlin brothers were, since they had produced Boomerang with Eddie Murphy and House Party.

  “I’m writing a movie for you,” he said. “It’s based on Rum Punch, the Elmore Leonard book.”

  “Well, that sounds amazing,” I said. I didn’t believe him.

  “It’s my version of Foxy Brown,” he went on.

  The traffic suddenly started moving. Quentin waved and weaved his way back to the sidewalk. I had started to drive when Warrington said, “Can you believe that?”

  “No, I can’t,” I answered. “Don’t believe everything a Hollywood director tells you.”

  Warrington was surprised at my reaction. But I’d been around the Hollywood scene long enough to know that without a script in hand, it was all idle talk. In fact, I forgot about it, and when I stopped seeing Warrington, I had no one to remind me. That was just as well, since waiting for a promised role can be deadly. But about six months later, a notice arrived from the post office that they were holding a package for me.

  It took me a few days to find the time to claim my package, on which there was 44 cents due for postage. I paid and they handed me a manila envelope. Quentin’s return address was scribbled in the left-hand corner in what I assumed was his own handwriting, and inside was a script entitled Jackie Brown. He had sent it weeks ago, but they had been unable to deliver it because there was money due.

  What do you know? He wasn’t kidding. Once I was home, I sat in a comfortable chair with a cup of herbal tea and started to read. The story was about a flight attendant, Jackie Brown, who was coerced by an ATF agent to help bring down an arms smuggler and his accomplices. Robert De Niro, Samuel Jackson, and Michael Keaton had already been cast. As I read on, I figured I could do the role of Melanie, a good-time girl who was one of the accomplices.

  I placed a call to Quentin’s office, and he got on the line immediately. “Jesus, Pam,” he said. “I sent the script to you weeks ago. I thought you were passing on it.”

  “I just got it today,” I said. “They were holding it ’cause you didn’t pay enough postage.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, anyway, how’d you like it?” he asked.

  “It was great. I’d really like to audition for the role of Melanie. I think I could do a great job.”

  Quentin laughed. “Bridget Fonda is playing Melanie,” he said. “You’re Jackie Brown, Pam. I told you I was writing a script for you. I loved Foxy Brown, and I wrote this in your honor.”

  It was true. Quentin Tarantino really had written a script for me, and it had cost me 44 cents to obtain my greatest role to date.

  CHAPTER 34

  Working with Quentin

  Five years after my cancer diagnosis, I headed to Chinatown in Los Angeles to thank some important doctors and herbalists in my life. They say that having clean MRIs for five years is remission, but I didn’t look at it like that. I still don’t. There was no actual moment when I stepped back and said, “I’m cured.” I knew better after seeing Krista, who had been cancer free for years when she was fatally stricken again. Life isn’t black-and-white like that. But I did have something to celebrate, and I felt grateful to my guides along the way.

  The Chinese herbalists were glad to see me, and I was thrilled to report my good health. But Dr. Morgan, the surgeon who had sent me to Chinatown in the first place, reminded me, “Don’t get cocky, Pam. I don’t want to burst your bubble, but it can come back at any time. You have to keep eating fresh foods with no hormones or preservatives. After all, you lost a third of your body’s lymph glands from your groin area, and you only have two-thirds left to fight infection—in your armpits and your neck. But you can start having MRIs every six months instead of every month.”

  He was making sure I stayed on my program, and I was on board with him. I had no intention of going back to the way things were. I was healed for the moment, and I was fortunate and filled with gratitude to still be here. “Thank you, God, for giving me another day,” I would pray each morning when I woke up. Namaste. And now, as I anticipated a great film role, I had also met a wonderful man, a record producer named Caleb. I was determined to stay healthy enough to enjoy it all.

  I met Caleb at a restaurant in my hotel in Los Angeles, and I liked the fact that he was from Denver, just like me, and he was unassuming, not at all aggressive. I was surprised that I fell hard and fast for him, but that was a symptom of the way my life was moving at that time. Talk about life in the fast lane! People had been fascinated and marginally excited about me as an actor from my past films—after all, I’d been one of the primary blaxploitation queens and had a built-in audience. But now that I was starring in a Tarantino movie, with famed Lawrence Bender as producer, I felt the full weight of being involved with a group of A-list players and brilliant producers—Bob and Harvey Weinstein.

  A powerful aphrodisiac, this kind of fame and celebrity stimulated people beyond belief. I was getting the best tables at restaurants, and people were dropping my name right and left now that I was connected to Quentin, rushing me for autographs wherever I went. While I tried to stay focused on my work, people were hoisting me on a pedestal so high I feared the inevitable drop would kill me. I tried to stay grounded and live as normally as possible, but now that my fame was speeding out of control, my new man, Caleb, was infected, and he was taking a leap off the deep end.

  Divorced with three young children (one was an infant), whom he saw on weekends (sometimes), Caleb had been perfectly happy just to hang out with me at first. But when my star began to rise higher than ever before, Caleb wanted the high life and everything that was part of it. “You need to spend more money, Pam, and be the star that you are.” He gestured to my red Suburban truck that was getting me around town just fine. “You need to get rid of that thing and get a hot whip [car] and show off a little.”

  I ignored his advice, and I was reluctant when he decided he needed all new furniture in his 7,000-square-foot Hollywood Hills home. Trying to be supportive, I spent my days off shopping—and fighting with him over furniture I didn’t like or care about. “Did you measure the square footage?” I asked him when we were looking at a ridiculously expensive modern Italian sofa that Caleb absolutely had to have. “I think it’s too long for the space,” I said, stunned at the over-the-moon price tag.

  “I don’t need to measure it,” he stated arrogantly. “I can tell by just looking. It’s perfect.”

  I lost count of how many chairs, tables, and couches got hauled u
p many levels of stairs that we had to send back down when they didn’t fit. Anyone who thinks that money doesn’t change people obviously never met Caleb. So why did I stay with him? I was in love, but not with him. I was in love with the idea of getting married and having kids. Caleb already had three of his own, which gave me an instant family, and I could see myself in a Vera Wang wedding dress, saying “I do,” and living in a lovely little town like Laguna Beach, overlooking the ocean and raising a bunch of kids together.

  Of course, it was all fantasy, since Caleb was falling in love with the “good life,” not with me. While Caleb’s own career was growing by leaps and bounds, I showed up on set each day, ready to shoot with Quentin. He was a wonderful director to work with, as he kept the cast and crew alive and excited. One afternoon, he declared that we would have “skirt day.” In the morning, all the men in his crew (the usual suspects with whom he always worked) showed up wearing kilts and skirts, and we laughed all day long.

  The way to a happy crew is through their stomachs, and Quentin provided good food and great music for all of us as we worked long and tedious hours. A meticulous director, he encouraged lots of rehearsal before we shot a scene. That saved a lot of shooting time, which was crucial, since time was a rare commodity. The stars in this film had a set amount of time they were available, with their next projects waiting in the wings. Going overtime was out of the question, and I felt so humbled around my co-stars, I made sure to prepare well so I didn’t drop a line and ruin an otherwise perfect take.

  Quentin sometimes shot scenes that were ten minutes long with no breaks, a challenge to any actor. He liked his director of photography to turn on the handheld camera and catch the action in a continuous movement and flow with no cuts. This was where the expertise of the cast was obvious. It took a lot of adrenaline to work that way, and I had to make sure I stayed on the beat, as if the other actors were my dance partners.

  Samuel Jackson, who played Ordell Robbie, an arms smuggler, was a superior performer and was always on point. He knew every word, he never dropped a line, and he looked directly into my eyes when we worked. We were moving along so well, in fact, that a day came when we were ahead of schedule, which was almost unheard of. Quentin wanted to take advantage of the extra time by shooting a scene between Sam and me that was not on the schedule. But Sam said he wasn’t ready. He had not prepared, and he didn’t want to shoot it cold. I was amazed that Sam had said no to Quentin. If the director wanted to shoot a certain scene, I would simply do it. But Sam felt differently.

  As if we were his teenage kids, Quentin proceeded to pit us against each other. A master manipulator, he told Sam, “I just talked to Pam. She’s ready. Why aren’t you?”

  “I don’t want to do it,” he said simply.

  I understood Sam’s position. He was the ultimate professional and knew whether he was ready. The truth is that most actors don’t like performing a scene in a half-prepared, halfhearted way. We like time to get into the character, the costume, and the setting. We like to figure out the character’s frame of mind and be familiar with the lines that hopefully we have already memorized until we know them backward and forward. Since an actor is only as popular as his or her last picture, we don’t savor shooting a scene on the spur of the moment. The risks are generally too high to flub a scene. But spur-of-the-moment was what Quentin, the master ringleader, was determined for us to be.

  “Pam is waiting for you,” he urged Sam, poking subtly at his ego. “She’s all ready,” he repeated.

  His method worked perfectly, as Sam took the bait. “I guess I can do it, then,” he said.

  Quentin came running over to me and said with a sparkle in his eye, “He’s gonna do it—once he knew you would.”

  I became suspicious. “Is he going to take it out on me?” I asked. “What did you say to him? Are you getting me in trouble here?”

  “No, no,” said Quentin. “It’s not like that.”

  I was prepared to go forward, so was Sam, but not without a rehearsal or two. Since every actor has his or her own timing and speech pattern or timbre, a co-star has to get used to them. For example, Jack Nicholson’s delivery is so slow, you wonder if he’s still on the other end of the phone call. But he can go from slow to ballistic in a few seconds. Samuel Jackson, on the other hand, has a fast timbre in his speaking patterns. Unlike someone from the South, who might speak as slowly as molasses in January, Sam talked so fast he could exhaust you just keeping up with him. Pulling off a great scene with Sam required total attention to his every word and movement.

  The scene ended up working because Quentin was such a gifted director. A real maestro, when he set up a shot, he would talk to the actors and go through the action himself as if he were in the scene. That gave you a clear idea of what he wanted, but he was not rigid. If he did something that didn’t make sense to you, you simply didn’t copy it, and he was usually okay with that. He gave us leeway and he was patient, but sometimes I think he could have done better at interpreting the emotional qualities of women, which are totally different from those of men.

  He was dating actress Mira Sorvino, a kind and gracious woman who was on the set occasionally. They looked madly in love, and I loved my chats with her. I felt that she was good for Quentin, but I sometimes wondered about his ability to understand what a woman needed.

  For example, there was a scene in Jackie Brown when my character was in the kitchen talking to Robert Forster’s character, a bail bondsman named Max Cherry. Jackie was frustrated and afraid, which she was trying to hide, and when I did the take, tears spontaneously came out of my eyes. I wasn’t sobbing or moaning. I was just crying quietly, because that was what happened naturally, and it surprised me as much as anyone else. The tears showed my internal struggle, as I tried to muster the strength to get through a tough experience.

  When we finished the take, there was not a dry eye among the crew members (usually a very tough audience), so I knew I had nailed it. They applauded, and I said, “That was it. That was the performance, right?” I looked to Quentin for validation, but he wasn’t satisfied.

  “You got another one in you?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, stunned, “I can do it again. But why?”

  “I’d like you to try it one more time without the tears,” he said. “I need you to look stronger.”

  Why do men see crying as a weakness? Jackie was in a very vulnerable state, unsure if she was about to be arrested or killed. I wanted to explain that to Quentin and tell him that my performance had been pure. But he was the director, and we ended up using the second take, the tearless one, which he liked, but in my opinion, it was less effective.

  For the most part, however, I agreed with how Quentin envisioned the action. I tried to knock every shot out of the park by being as real and raw as possible. A perfect example was an interrogation scene I did with Michael Keaton’s character, Ray Nicolette, a government agent. I wanted it to feel like a real interrogation room, where they shined a glaring light on you and didn’t allow you to leave to go the bathroom.

  I sat on a hard chair for eight hours to shoot that scene, and I took no bathroom breaks. I wanted to feel trapped and scared because the agent was supposed to be pressuring me. “I’m cornered,” I said to myself as my bladder was slowly filling up. The hours went by, and I had to go to the bathroom so badly my eyes hurt. I thought I might let it go right there in my seat. Finally, when I couldn’t have been any more tired or cranky with my bladder so full I could scream, I had a spontaneous angry outburst that defined the agony of the moment, particularly because Jackie was generally a calm person who spoke directly and clearly.

  Scenes like these are amazing opportunities for an actor, and I did my best to take full advantage. When the ten-week shoot was over, I felt good about my performance and the amount of effort I’d put into it. I was excited to see how it would come out in the editing room, since that is where so many performances are won or lost. I felt secure that Quentin would be good
to me during postproduction. I trusted his judgment, we both wanted the film to be great, and I admired his integrity around his work.

  CHAPTER 35

  Caleb

  Jackie Brown was finished, edited, and promoted. I especially enjoyed being interviewed by my friend Michael Keaton for Interview magazine in January 1998.

  Among many other questions, he asked, “It seems to me you have an amazing perspective on what’s important to you. You’re someone who’s really able to detach from the career part of her life, but in the healthiest way. Do you think you’ve always had that in you, or did it come because you went through some really tough years, when you lost your sister and faced cancer yourself?”

  I answered, “I was brought up to be self-sufficient and to accept that as a member of the human race, there are certain things you have to go through. I always thought that not living here in Hollywood was a way of showing that I’m not afraid of losing my career. I’m afraid of losing me.”

  Once the PR was over, I took some time off to see what Caleb was really like—without my celebrity calling the shots. I’d traveled extensively through Asia and Europe to promote the film, and everywhere I went, the character of Jackie Brown struck a chord with women. They loved the idea of a woman with no power learning to gather her forces to scam the drug dealers who were trying to scam her.

  When we got to New York, they put me up at the luxurious Trump Tower. I was working with a genius publicist, Kelly Bush, when the phone rang in my hotel room early one morning. It was still dark when I reached over to grab it. “Hello?” I mumbled.

  “Pam!” Kelly practically shouted, “You’re nominated for a Golden Globe Award.”

  I sat up. What would I wear? The Golden Globe Awards, with its dinner club atmosphere, is considered one of the most elite award shows, with the winners chosen by the foreign press. It was exciting and humbling to be in the race with such great actresses as Helen Hunt, Julia Roberts, and Jennifer Lopez. I realized that win or lose, this was going to be a rare moment for me, a woman of color, and I was not disappointed when Helen Hunt took away the honors for her role in As Good as It Gets. That year, I was up against Helen for every conceivable award, and I lost them all.