Bob was indeed pure light. My buddy Lisa, who knew everyone who was anyone, had introduced me to him at the Roxy nightclub in Los Angeles, years before I met Danny. I then had the pleasure of seeing him several times over the years at concerts and other social events throughout the States and the islands. He was so mild-mannered, sweet, and pleasant to be around. Knowing that I had had such lovely times with Bob over the years, Danny asked if I would call him and arrange a meeting with him to clear the air. It would make a world of difference to Danny’s business and professional profile if he could get back into Marley’s good graces. Of course I agreed, wanting to do anything to help my husband’s business grow, thinking that, when Danny’s business grew, we grew. I honestly believed that Danny was on the up-and-up and had Bob’s best interests at heart when I agreed to reconnect them. I would have never reached out to Bob if I hadn’t believed that.
Being unaware of how deep Danny had dug himself into a hole with Bob, I called the reggae star at his Florida home, hoping to make amends. Bob graciously took my call, and we had a nice chat until the subject of Danny came up. I told Bob that I was now married to Danny Sims, and I can still hear his response in that deep Jamaican accent of his. “I’m sorry to hear dat,” he said. “I’m sorry to hear you are mixed up with dat man. He no good for you.”
This was hardly the best lead-in for me to suggest a meeting with Danny or to tell Bob that we were coming down to Florida the following week.
I told him that Danny had changed since our marriage. I also told him how upset Danny was about Bob’s unhappiness over his perceived mistreatment and financial mismanagement. Marley listened patiently to my defense of my new husband, but he never said yea or nay to an upcoming meeting. That said, he didn’t say “don’t come” either, and that was a huge plus.
Danny and I arrived in Florida the following week and drove directly to Marley’s estate. I told Danny to wait in the car while I searched for Bob in the studio section of his home because I really needed to get Bob in a relaxed state before I mentioned Danny again to him. Bob had the heartiest laugh of anyone, and it didn’t take much to make him chuckle. I found him in his studio and we talked about old times. Bob was chilled out, so I asked if Danny could come in and join us. I’ll never forget Bob rubbing his freshly done dreads and letting out a long sigh before saying, “OK, my Queen, for you, he can come in.” (Bob always called me his Queen.)
I got Danny from the car and excused myself so the men could talk business. After about an hour, Danny and Bob emerged all smiles, as though there had never been a rift between them at all. Danny had worked that good old magic again and now would be managing Bob once more.
I still remember saying a prayer under my breath, “Please don’t let me have led the great Bob Marley astray!”
CHAPTER 12
If It Isn’t Love?
Despite the misgivings I had about Danny Sims, I was still only twenty-five, and I was certain that I had found the kind of mature love and partnership I’d always hoped to find in a long-term commitment. We’d hit a few bumps in the road during the early weeks of our union, but I was determined not to let them undermine who we were as a couple. We were much stronger than that.
Danny was smart, savvy, and wise in all the ways that counted. From his first two marriages, he knew well what commitment entailed and seemed ready to invest the time and effort needed to make our marriage lasting and meaningful.
I was ready to invest the time, too. Having grown up in a home with parents who had been married for over thirty years, I yearned for that kind of stability. I wanted a love I could always fall back on, with a man who understood me completely, for better or worse, and I was convinced Danny was that man for me. I think it came down to the long talks we had about his life growing up in the South and how he would readily listen to my opinions on whatever topic we discussed. He was old enough to be secure in his masculinity, confident enough to support me in whatever I was involved in, and smart enough to know that two people must work hard in order to build love and trust for a real and lasting marriage.
I hadn’t met many men before who understood those relationship principles. Then again, I hadn’t met a lot of real men at all. The men I had encountered up to that point were just not mature enough to know what real life and real love actually meant.
Danny understood everything about true love, and wanted a second chance to raise a family. He also wanted to make right what he’d failed at in his earlier relationships. Yet I was still worried that life—real life—was quickly passing me by.
My best friend, Dada, gave birth to her first child at age eighteen, and here I was at twenty-five on my second marriage. But I was confident that Danny was my knight in shining armor, because he was ready, willing, and able to walk with me through the good times and the bad times, because that was what marriage meant to him.
Though we both traveled a great deal for our work, we always made an effort to travel together as much as possible. When we couldn’t be together, nothing made me happier than searching for unique trinkets for Danny from the various countries I visited. Danny, too, continued to surprise me with gorgeous jewels whenever the spirit hit him, and our loving bond continued.
As our tie deepened, Danny and I continued our long talks about the dreams I had for my career. Danny was a mastermind of careers, and he enjoyed discussing how I could reach the next level. He saw my future much in the same way I did, growing in multiple directions and existing on several tiers, and hopefully for decades to come. He completely bought into the vision of the movie roles I might get, the cosmetic and beauty lines I could become the face of, and the chart-topping music albums I might record. All this would happen while my face continued to smile brightly from the covers of major global fashion magazines.
I had always loved music while growing up, although I never considered myself a singer in the traditional sense of the word. Danny saw my potential as a singer, though, and he had a laser-sharp eye for identifying talent and a gift for selling that talent to the masses. He was convinced I had a real Tina Turner vibe inside me and that I could have hits because I was such a successful model. So just like that, becoming a singer suddenly rose to the top of my to-do list.
After the Vogue cover, I had returned to the Eileen Ford agency because in the end I knew only Eileen could maximize the opportunities coming my way. But one of my new husband’s boatload of ideas for my career involved my leaving Eileen Ford once again. Danny wanted me to join the Elite Modeling Agency.
When I learned Johnny Casablancas, the Paris agent, was planning on opening his Elite Model Management stateside, I told Danny that I thought it was a great idea. Eileen Ford had always dominated the modeling industry in the US, and Johnny in Paris. Johnny’s move was a significant threat to Eileen, and she knew it. What I didn’t know at the time was that Danny had gone ahead and devised a plan to get a very handsome paycheck from Johnny Casablancas after arranging my departure and the departure of many other top models who followed my lead. We were established models who loved Johnny’s new and fresh approach to the modeling game because he understood better than most that it was a brand-new day in the modeling world, and the old way of thinking just wouldn’t do. Johnny also didn’t mind letting the wealth trickle down, something Eileen didn’t seem to be a fan of. My very presence at the company was crucial in enticing other models to switch over to Elite. And because I had encouraged the other models to leave Ford with me, I believed I would at least receive a small percentage of Elite’s annual gross. I would later learn how wrong I was.
Danny also decided he would make himself extra-useful by trying to build my brand in an industry I desperately wanted to infiltrate—the movie business. Robert Evans, the big-time Hollywood studio head who was once married to Ali MacGraw, had always been a huge champion of my acting talents. The two of us had a short but intense love affair in the mid-seventies and had remained friends.
Surprisingly, even with Evans flexing his powerful mus
cles, I didn’t have much luck getting Hollywood to notice me. Over the years, my extensive modeling résumé managed to snag me an audition with Aaron Spelling for the television show Charlie’s Angels, when Kate Jackson chose not to renew her contract. This was well after Farrah had made her big exit. The role was a huge deal because back then, a black woman getting an ultra-sexy part in a prime-time television show was rare indeed.
Who I am kidding? It’s rare today, too.
The only main black female characters on the small screen back then were Florida Evans on Good Times and Weezy on The Jeffersons. No disrespect to Esther Rolle or Isabel Sanford, the wonderfully talented ladies who starred as those characters, but those two roles didn’t exactly scream girl power or sexuality. Instead, they showcased black women in more traditional, nonthreatening, and nonsexual ways, so that mainstream America wouldn’t feel uncomfortable.
That was the background to why I jumped at the chance to audition for Charlie’s Angels. After I nailed my reading in front of mega-producer Spelling and a few others, I was convinced the role was mine for the taking. Three beautiful and strong women navigating a man’s world, all the while kicking ass and taking names without a hair out of place? That was me all day long. Plus, the addition of a name like mine on a show like that would surely take it back to its Farrah Fawcett glory days! It would be a win-win for everyone.
There was just one problem—my phone never rang. I guess neither ABC nor mainstream America was quite ready to see an African-American woman in such an overtly sexy role on a weekly basis. Or maybe, just maybe, I hadn’t nailed the audition the way I thought I had. Race was a serious problem in America then as it is now, but it isn’t always the problem every time.
I had been taking acting very seriously, and had been attending weekly classes to sharpen my skills. Still, I’m not suggesting that I was giving Cicely Tyson a run for her money. There were limits to what I could do as an actress, and I knew it. But then again, Charlie’s Angels wasn’t exactly the finest writing television had to offer, either. Still, I spent more than a few nights wondering what if. If I had gotten that part in Charlie’s Angels, there’s no telling where my career might have gone. Farrah did only one season of the show and was the belle of the ball in Hollywood for years.
There were some roles in the movies, too, that I would have loved to make my own. Though a little before my time, Mahogany—with its fabulous clothes, well-coiffed dos, and those killer Diana Ross eyelashes—would have been a dream come true for me. And I don’t just mean the role. There was also the oh-so-fine Billy Dee Williams as the love interest.
Appearing in Claudine would have been a pretty amazing opportunity for me as an actress, too. Diahann Carroll managed to look flawless in every frame, portraying a down-on-her-luck welfare mother. She was initially told by the Hollywood studio behind the film that her regal looks would prevent her from successfully portraying a woman on food stamps, and it’s not hard to see why they said that. Diahann is one of the most elegant and refined women in the world, but she is also a first-rate actress, which means she was able to pull off the role so well that she scored an Oscar nomination for Best Actress in 1975. Sadly, though, starring roles like those for women of color were, and are still, few and far between.
So it’s little wonder that when I got my hands on a little script with the African name Ashanti, I held on tight.
The plot centered on the modern-day slave trade and focused on a white man hell-bent on rescuing his beautiful black wife, a doctor who had been kidnapped by brutal slave traders while on a medical mission in Western Africa. The film was to be shot in exotic places like Israel, Sicily, Kenya, and the Sahara desert. The cast read like a who’s who of Hollywood at the time—Michael Caine, Rex Harrison, Peter Ustinov, Omar Sharif, and William Holden would all make appearances in the Warner Bros. film, which practically guaranteed box office success, or so it seemed to me. What more could an aspiring actress ask?
Every black actress in the world auditioned for the part, yet my hopes remained high that somehow I would win the role. The part didn’t call for a great actress; the character wouldn’t be reciting Shakespeare, and in any case she only garnered a limited amount of screen time.
Again, I was sure I’d nailed the audition. But, again, the only phone call I got was to inform me that the very talented actress Beverly Todd had been given the role. Crushed doesn’t begin to describe how let down I felt. Danny came up with a bunch of theories about why I didn’t get it, but in the end he had no idea, and he couldn’t make it right anyway. There were only a handful of roles for women of color out there and the competition was thick. I just had to suck up the disappointment and move on.
With my dream role out of reach, my heart and mind had to move on to other items on my to-do list. This included making a record and writing a health and beauty book, and having a child. Not that all these things were equal, of course.
Danny would eventually get me a record deal, too, but he was forever putting creative projects together. I once sat in our kitchen and watched him put together an entire Earth, Wind & Fire fifty-city concert tour, with the Emotions as the opening act, all in the course of one afternoon. (During the late seventies and early eighties, those were two of the hottest groups around in R&B.) It was nothing for me to come home and find Donna Summer, Joe Jackson (Michael’s father), or Lionel Richie at the kitchen table, talking with Danny about their latest album or single.
Danny began managing the Jacksons, along with Joe, directly as a result of my longtime relationship with the Jackson family. I had met the famous musical group after one of their concerts in the early seventies, back when Michael was still a young boy. The family and I had continued to keep in touch throughout the years, and I even had one or two dates with Jackie Jackson when I visited Los Angeles for work. Michael would routinely dial me up for skin-care tips, too, because he struggled with horrible acne during his teen years. The acne, among other things, scarred him psychologically for the rest of his life. I can only imagine what it felt like for Michael to have grown up an adorable little boy, and then suddenly to be stricken with teen acne, scars that became a magnified horror because they happened in front of the world. I felt so bad for the poor kid, so I would routinely offer him the best tips from the top makeup artists employed by Vogue and other high-end magazines on how to camouflage the dark marks left behind from pimples. I also told him to buy a tube of the tried-and-true Black and White bleaching cream to get rid of the dark spots. (This was way before his pigmentation disease, vitiligo, began to take hold of his skin.)
Two years after Michael’s death, I was backstage at the close of a concert by his younger sister, Janet, when she told me about some of the conversations she and Michael had shared. He would often tell her stories about our chats, it seems, and all the crazy things we talked about, including the makeup tips. Janet revealing those things about her much-beloved brother really meant a lot to me. Knowing that Michael and his family always embraced and welcomed me into their inner circle made me feel loved and included. It was also nice to get a glimpse into the Jacksons’ tight family bond. Despite what’s often said by the media about them, they all seemed to be very close, which I loved.
So Danny came through for me in the music world, too, and convinced the best of the best to work on my debut album. Heavyweight producer David Foster was on board to write and produce the album, and Clive Davis agreed to release it on his Buddah Records label. Davis played a pivotal role in the careers of so many music stars, like Aretha Franklin, Barry Manilow, Rod Stewart, and later on, the great Whitney Houston, and he came through for me. Clive and I are still good friends today, and he always invites me to his very chic annual Grammy party. He also enjoys playing the music of his new artists for me from time to time.
After Danny got me the music project, he then moved Betty Wright into our home for several months to get my voice in tip-top singing condition.
Betty Wright was a well-known R&B singer who had gai
ned fame with gritty hits such as “Clean Up Woman” and “Tonight Is the Night.” Danny had worked with her for years, and had gone out of his way to make sure Betty got the money she was due over the years for various recordings she’d made. Artists routinely ran into problems receiving royalty payments for music they had written, mostly as the result of poorly written contracts.
I hadn’t met many women like Betty Wright before, but I sure loved how she could belt out a song and tell you a my-man-done-me-wrong story like no other. Much in the same vein as Minnie Riperton, Deniece Williams, and Mariah Carey, Betty was also a master at the whistle register—the highest of the human voice—which sent chills up my spine whenever she used it. Danny hoped that with Betty’s help I would get somewhere near that register, too. Poor man was living in a fantasy world when it came to my singing talents, but I still was in awe of the way his creative mind worked.
Ms. Betty Wright was full of pure down-home southern charm. She was from Florida and brought all that southern “flava” with her into our house. She also brought along her boyfriend, a Baptist preacher who moved into the apartment right alongside us. Betty and I had our rehearsals every morning using various vocal exercises combined with drinking a variety of exotic warm teas to soothe my developing throat muscles. Given the time Betty spent with me, and the fact that I was never going to win a Grammy award, I had to imagine Betty must have been pretty grateful to Danny for all the back pay he recovered from her record companies.
My husband had two sons from his earlier marriages, two very handsome children he rarely took the time to see or keep in touch with. I pointed this out to him whenever he mentioned the idea of our procreating. My hope was that I could get Danny to understand that this wasn’t some game we were playing—if we were going to have children, he was damn sure going to be a real father this time around.
The Face That Changed It All Page 14