He paused.
“Do you think you want to do this, Misty?” he asked. “Cindy thinks it’s in your best interest, but you’re the one who has to decide.”
All these years later, I still cannot remember what I felt in that moment. Mommy had not always been the mother that I felt that she should be, but she was still mine. I loved her, and I knew that she loved me. I didn’t want to hurt her.
But did she really know what was best for me? Often it seemed we children had to take care of her and each other, instead of the other way around.
I had to make a choice.
And in that moment, for the first time, I chose myself. I chose ballet. And that meant staying with Cindy.
“Yes,” I said softly. “I want to be emancipated.”
The rest is all a fuzzy nightmare.
I know that Steven Bartell quickly gathered the papers that had been sitting on the table in front of him. “We’re going to need to contact your mother,” he said. “And you shouldn’t be around when we do. I’m sure she’ll calm down once she gets past the initial shock, but in the meantime, Cindy wants you to stay with some friends.”
Cindy hustled me into her car and drove me to the home of another student at the San Pedro Dance Center whom I barely knew. If the girl’s mother offered me something to eat, I had no appetite. They tried to make small talk at first, but I was distracted, dazed. I would respond when spoken to, but mostly I just sat, numb, watching the TV.
“What are they going to say to Mommy?” I wondered, my stomach in knots and my head pounding. “What’s Mommy going to think? How will my brothers and sisters feel?”
I found out later that Mommy called the police and reported me missing. In her frantic search, she also apparently reached out to the media. I can only imagine what might have been said on the six o’clock news.
“Misty Copeland, a local girl who’s been recognized as a ballet prodigy, is missing,” the anchor would say.
“The girl’s mother, Sylvia DelaCerna, has reported her disappearance to the local police. She believes that her daughter’s dance instructor, Cynthia Bradley, is involved.”
Then they would have shown Mommy, terrified and angry.
“I haven’t been able to reach her. She was staying temporarily with her dance teacher, but is now moving back home, and I’m sure Cindy Bradley has something to do with this.”
I felt like I was going to throw up.
I stayed with that family for three days, fearful I’d be in trouble for running away. Then, one morning, Steven Bartell showed up.
“Misty,” he said, “I need you to get your things.”
We met with two police officers, who then drove me to a local police station. Soon after, Mommy arrived. She grabbed me and held on tight.
I walked out of the police station with my mother. I feared I was leaving ballet behind forever. Mommy got behind the wheel, and I climbed in beside her, sobbing hysterically. My world was ending.
LIFE HAD NOT JUST turned full circle. It had sped up, then rotated in reverse.
I was back with my family, back at the Sunset Inn.
The motel walkways were still covered with grime. The room we shared was unkempt, cluttered. At night, blanket or sleeping bag in tow, I struggled to ferret out a spot on the living room floor where I would sleep among my siblings. This was the life that Mommy had forced me back to. A few days before I’d been in a beautiful condo, the soft swish of the surf lulling me to sleep. Now, the bleat of highway traffic woke me from my dreams. I went days without eating an apple or even so much as a canned vegetable. I thought Mommy was selfish and cruel, sacrificing my well-being, my opportunity, to soothe her own battered pride. I overflowed with anger and resentment.
How could she do this to me?
Those first days back home, I would lock myself in the bathroom for hours, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, crying. I didn’t want to be around my mother. I didn’t want to be around my brothers and sisters. I just wanted to be left alone.
But that was going to be impossible. Even though I was back home, our emancipation drama was in only its first act.
Mommy took the Bradleys to court, hiring the well-known attorney Gloria Allred to represent her. Hiring Gloria Allred was like posting the details of your life in neon on the Sunset Strip. Cameras and reporters were everywhere, hovering near the Torrance courthouse, even gathering outside our front door.
Mommy accused Cindy and Patrick of manipulating me into filing for emancipation and said that she wanted a restraining order to keep the Bradleys away from me for good. Though I didn’t want anything to do with it, Mommy forced me to accompany her to court. She and Gloria felt my presence reinforced their position. Bewildered and scared, I would look down at the floor to avoid the camera flashes and prying eyes, but every once in a while I would steal a glance at Cindy and Patrick. They stared straight ahead, but I noticed Cindy’s lips trembling. It was hard to see them looking so tired, hurt, and sad.
At first, Cindy and Patrick fought back. They told the press, the court, and anyone else who would listen that they had just wanted me to have the kind of home life and exposure that a young, talented ballerina needed. That kind of stability and refinement, they argued, was something that my mother—single, with six children and little income—could hardly provide. Cindy later told one reporter that if I had wanted it, she would even have adopted me.
But by the fall, the fury had begun to subside. Through Gloria Allred, I formally withdrew my emancipation petition. And Mommy’s restraining order request went nowhere because Cindy and Patrick hadn’t harassed or threatened my family or me.
“The dismissal of the emancipation petition accomplished Sylvia’s main goal of keeping the family bonds intact and strong, without interference by third parties,” Allred said in a statement at the time. “In the sworn declarations filed by the Bradleys in response to the restraining order, they said that we have not and will never do anything to interfere with Misty’s relationship with her mother. . . . Since Sylvia has accomplished all of the goals that she intended to achieve when she filed her papers with the court, we have chosen not to proceed to seek an injunction in this matter.”
Except for a few rare occasions, I wouldn’t see Cindy or Patrick again for over a decade. Had I known that night would be our last, I wouldn’t have spent it sleeping blissfully in my bed. I would have gathered them to me, squeezing them tight, and not letting go.
WHEN MOMMY AND THE Bradleys decided to stand down, it ended the fight in the courts. But the battle in my mind and spirit raged on.
In September, I returned to San Pedro High School, a sixteen-year-old eleventh grader. Being there was different from before. Now, everyone knew my secrets.
All through my school years, I had tried to appear perfect. Arriving at school long before the first bell rang, being the most earnest hall monitor Dana Middle School had ever seen, demanding the same excellence from my drill-team charges that I demanded of myself.
I didn’t allow anyone, not even my best friends, to get close enough to see how spoiled my life was underneath. I didn’t invite them to Robert’s house, which was scarred by hostility and violence, or to the random apartments or the shabby motel room my family shared. My classmates didn’t know about the series of men rotating through my mother’s life, or the foraging for change when the food stamps were spent. They had no idea that my cheerleading sister and athletic brothers, so carefree during the day, had to come home at night and act like parents to me, Lindsey, and sometimes Cameron.
Now the curtain had been thrown open for the world to peer in. Misty Copeland, the ballerina girl, had an upside-down life.
Looking back, even I recognize that my story was a sensational one. Like the most tragic ballets, there was a central character, innocent and bright, being pulled and pushed between two worlds. Would I emerge triumphant, like the Firebird? Or would I be more like Giselle, who succumbs to a broken heart? My ending had yet to be written.
/> Newspaper columnists opined about my future and who was best to steer it. There were articles in the Los Angeles Times and segments on the entertainment show Extra. On the local television news, sandwiched between the latest shooting and an ordinance being voted on at City Hall, there were shots of the Sunset Inn and images of me spinning in tulle and chiffon, while my world crashed around me.
We even got calls from producers who were interested in doing a TV or feature film about the whole ordeal. Mommy retained a lawyer to sift through the offers.
Meanwhile, I had to get through the first days of school at San Pedro High. My classmates greeted me tentatively.
“Hi, Misty,” they murmured nervously.
“Glad you’re back,” one girl, who had danced with me on the drill team at Dana, said a tad too cheerily.
They were trying to be nice, to act as if it all was no big deal, but for someone as shy as me, so fearful of being judged, it was hard to imagine a worse scenario.
But there was nowhere to hide. I had tried to run and failed. Now, just as in my first competition, I needed a backup plan so my audience wouldn’t know how much I was faltering inside.
I remembered Paloma Herrera, dancing her pas de deux in Don Quixote. At the conclusion of the ballet, she didn’t take her partner’s hand. Fierce and independent, she stood apart and balanced on her own.
I knew that’s what I would have to do now. Recover, hold my head up high, and balance on my own.
IT WAS IMPORTANT TO me that I not miss too many days of dance class. So a couple weeks after going back home to Mommy, I was thrilled to be in a studio again, turning my focus back to ballet.
Named for its founder and director, Diane Lauridsen, the Lauridsen Ballet Centre wasn’t affiliated with a ballet company. It was a small studio, but it had a strong reputation in Torrance, California.
I believe Diane had prepared the other students for my arrival. They didn’t turn their noses up at “the prodigy,” or gawk at the girl in the middle of a custody tug-of-war. Instead, they embraced me easily, like family. I was relieved to be on familiar ground, immersed in ballet, surrounded by others content to spend hours stretching and straining in pointe shoes.
The first two girls I met there remain two of my closest friends to this day: Kaylen Ratto is my partner in my dancewear business, and Ashley Ellis went on to join ABT a year after me and was a member of the corps for five years. She’s now a principal dancer with Boston Ballet.
It is rare to have two students from a school that was not professionally oriented end up performing with a major company. But it happened. And Ashley and I, as well as Kaylen, were inseparable from the beginning. They didn’t speak of my ordeal, though I’m sure they knew all about it. Their friendship was like a salve, warm and healing.
I remember that Diane allowed my mother to throw me a sweet-sixteen party at the studio. My new dance mates were invited, and the Cantines. The Lauridsen Centre closed its doors early, and there were dangling decorations and a table filled with potato chips and cake.
But I still suffered migraines whenever I was under stress, and I had just gone through the most difficult period of my life. I lay down in a darkened back room for two hours, embarrassed and upset, while the party went on up front.
I heard later that everyone had a blast.
THOUGH DIANE AND THE students were welcoming, I was hardly treated with kid gloves when it came to my dancing. Lauridsen was a small school, but the technique taught there was at a very different level from what I’d experienced at Cindy’s. The painful truth was that, despite my being deemed a prodigy, the fact that I had been dancing only two years and was the best student at the San Pedro Dance Center was a testament to that school’s limitations. More so than anything, the level of healthy competition from the dancers around me in San Pedro was hardly that of the more advanced students at Lauridsen.
It was different studying with Diane. Even after being exposed to the rigors of my six-week summer program in San Francisco, Diane’s school opened my eyes to the realization that my technique needed polishing. I quickly had to shift gears, to refine, and in some cases even to relearn, various steps. To more quickly push my second foot beneath my first as I leaped in an assemblé, to make sure that when I swept my pointed foot around in a circle in my ronds de jambe, I etched the letter D, instead of drawing a squishy sphere.
I was eager to learn and work hard to catch up, to get as close to perfection as I possibly could. I had no time ever to preen and rest on my laurels. Still, if I’d had an ounce of attitude, Diane would have doused it.
Diane never let anything slide. She reminded me over and over again how much work I still had ahead. “Don’t sit into your hyperextended knees,” she said as she softly nudged their flexible backs as a reminder.
“Straighten your back,” she’d command. “Push through your turn.”
Cindy had always treated me like her little superstar, pushing to showcase my talent. Not worrying about the social politics that impacted even her small ballet school, Cindy never allowed anyone to convince her otherwise. If that meant losing a board member donating thousands of dollars because their kid was not being featured, then so be it. But Diane and her studio worked differently. I was just another one of the girls in her classes, needing to learn and to work hard, like everyone else.
At that time in my life, I think I desperately needed to feel that I fit in and was like everybody else. My teacher, my classmates, and my dancing are what kept me sane.
Photographers and reporters would still come to the school occasionally to see me. I didn’t like attention that set me apart from my friends. But eventually, they were coming to talk about the various ballet companies that were interested in my being a part of their summer programs—and, I hoped, one day their studio companies—rather than the controversy that had dogged me.
Still, the drama involving my mother, Cindy, and me would have one final, traumatic act before its coda.
“CINDY NEEDS TO SHUT her mouth,” Mommy said.
It was a constant refrain. Mommy said that Cindy was still talking to reporters and making her out to be a bad, negligent mother.
“We’ve got to make sure we get our side of the story out there,” she said. At times she seemed obsessed in her furor.
One day she told me that she had gotten a call from the producers of Leeza, a talk show anchored by onetime entertainment reporter Leeza Gibbons. They wanted Mommy to come on to talk about her initial arrangement with Cindy, how it had deteriorated and led to my eventual disappearance. Mommy agreed, despite my fervent protests.
It turned out that Cindy would also be there, though not in the same room as Mommy, to make sure both got to air her version of events.
I was terrified. It would be the first time I was in the same space as Cindy since those days in court a few months before. I didn’t want to relive that experience. It had been so traumatic, and I was just starting to recover. I just wanted to be in the studio, dancing.
I told Mommy I wouldn’t do the show. But she reassured me that I wouldn’t have to sit on the stage: I could just sit in the audience, and maybe Leeza would walk over and ask me a couple of questions. My brothers and sisters would also be there for support.
I will never forget the day of the taping. Mommy said that she would come by the school to pick me up. So after my last class, I went outside and waited, expecting her to pull up in her cream-colored Honda Civic.
To my horror, a black limousine rumbled down the street, then stopped in front of me. The driver opened the door, and inside I saw Doug, Erica, Chris, Lindsey, and, of course, Mommy. It was exactly the kind of showy display that I hated. I didn’t want attention unless I was pirouetting on a stage, and now, here in front of working-class San Pedro High, was a stretch limousine.
Everyone—my classmates, even some of the teachers—was now gawking at me, wondering what was happening, where I was going.
I hurried into the car, wishing that it was a shell i
nto which I could burrow and hide. Crying, I began to yell at Mommy.
“A limo? How could you pick me up from school in a limo when you know this is already too much for me?”
The car was silent except for my sobbing.
It all only got worse from there. I sat in the audience, next to Erica, while Mommy took a seat on the stage. Cindy was there, too, but in a back room, visible only on a monitor as a producer interviewed her separately.
Though Mommy had warned me, I was startled when Leeza Gibbons suddenly turned her attention to me, asking a couple of questions. I managed to mutter yes and no before I broke down crying.
That’s when Erica, always protective and maternal, stood up and took the microphone.
“You tried to destroy our family,” Erica yelled at the monitor showing Cindy’s face. “You exploited a little girl, and now you want to act like you’re an angel and we’re the bad guys. We’ll never forgive you for what you tried to do.”
It had to have been the longest hour of my life. The limousine later dropped us off at home. And the next day I went to school, trying to keep the spark of anguish that had been reignited from bursting into a full flame.
As I walked down the hallway, several of my classmates approached me. “We saw you on TV,” they told me. “Our teacher turned on the show so the class could watch.”
I was mortified—I felt naked, exposed. I no longer had Cindy’s home, the San Pedro studio, or school. Nowhere was sacred. But I had no choice but to keep going.
SLOWLY, THE DAYS RESUMED a regular flow instead of their former slow, creeping quality. A few months after I moved back home, Mommy got a new sales job and was able to get a comfortable two-bedroom apartment on a quiet street in San Pedro. That was the first time that I felt we’d ever had a home that was truly our mother’s, not available to us based on the whims of some man.
Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina Page 11