The Face That Changed It All

by Beverly Johnson

  A tour of the gorgeous home followed, and we had the chance to meet Ennis, Mr. Cosby’s only son (Ennis was tragically murdered in Los Angeles just a few years later). While I had a lovely visit, there was no opportunity that day to practice scenes for the show, so when Mr. Cosby invited me to visit a few days later to run a few lines, I agreed.

  On that next visit, we started by sharing a meal, and then set off to practice our lines in the second floor’s bar area. The first thing to catch my eye was an enormous espresso machine sitting on the bar’s counter. Espresso machines weren’t common in homes in the mid-eighties.

  As we settled in to rehearse, Mr. Cosby asked if I wouldn’t mind acting out the part of a drunken woman for the scene we were about to practice. As I concentrated on portraying the best drunk I could, Mr. Cosby made a cappuccino and offered it to me. I declined—it was late afternoon, and coffee of any kind would keep me from sleeping that night. Between the custody court battles and a host of other issues in my life, I really needed every possible minute of sleep and it often took me hours to drift off.

  But Mr. Cosby wasn’t interested in my insomnia. He kept insisting that I’d never had a cappuccino like this one, and I’d be missing out on something really spectacular. I didn’t want to argue with him after he’d been so gracious, so against my better judgment I took a few sips. In an instant, I felt woozy. I certainly had enough experience with mood enhancers to know the way they make you feel, and the room had begun spinning around me. Mr. Cosby motioned for me to come over to him, and somehow I steadied myself enough to make my way across the room to where he was standing. As we met in the center of the room, he put his hands around my waist, and I put my hand on his shoulder to ensure I wouldn’t fall down.

  All of a sudden, the impact of what was happening to me really set in and I became enraged. I believed that Mr. Cosby had drugged me. Before I knew it, a profanity-laced tirade came out of my mouth. I called him “motherfucker” so many times he stepped back and glared at me as if I were losing my mind.

  As I began to wobble even more, Mr. Cosby grabbed my arm and dragged me roughly down the stairs. Before I could say anything, he had thrown me into a cab and slammed the door behind me. Somehow, I found the lucidity to tell the cabdriver where I lived before I completely passed out. I can only assume my lovely doorman made sure I reached my apartment safely, since he’d helped me out a few times before. I woke up late the next day still woozy and confused about what had happened. What had Bill Cosby tried to do to me and why?

  Later, I decided to call Mr. Cosby and ask him what had happened. I used the number he had given me, and his wife, Camille, answered. She told me that she and Bill were both in bed, and that was that. I never called him again. I had too much to lose to pursue it. I would have to make my own peace with it somehow.

  I’ve seen Mr. Cosby once or twice since that day, although he did not speak to me on either occasion.

  Fast-forward to December 2014. A comic doing his stand-up routine accused Cosby of rape, and a recording of that performance went viral. As odd as it may seem, that comedy routine inspired more than twenty women to come forward to say they had been drugged and/or raped by Bill Cosby. In the end it took nearly thirty some years before I felt strong enough to share my story with the public, a decision largely influenced by the bravery of those women telling their truth. I felt a tremendous weight lifted from my entire being. I never knew that I was carrying so much pain from that one day thirty years ago. I can honestly say that speaking out was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life and the best thing I could ever have done for myself and other women who have faced similar circumstances. I was so afraid of talking about what had happened to me for so long that I was truly shocked by the amazing response I received. I can only hope that telling my story gives courage to other women to speak out about the trauma that they have faced.

  CHAPTER 17

  Iron Mike and the Real Fresh Prince of Bel-Air

  One day, in November 1986, someone rang my doorbell at my Eighty-Ninth Street apartment. It was a tranquil Sunday afternoon, and as I wasn’t expecting anyone, I didn’t exactly rush to answer it. When I finally made it to the door, I asked who was there, and a slightly high-pitched voice on the other side answered.

  “It’s Mike Tyson,” said the voice.

  About a week earlier, right before Mike was set to fight for the first time for the heavyweight championship title in Las Vegas, my dear friends Paul Herman and Nikki Haskell had introduced Mike and me at an uptown eatery in New York City. Paul had said that I was in the presence of the next heavyweight champion of the world, even if he did look like one big kid.

  As soon as we met, Mike gushed about what a big a fan he had always been of me and my career. He wouldn’t stop telling me how beautiful I was, and I admit that I basked in the sincerity of his compliments. As we got ready to leave, Mike asked if it would be OK if he bothered Paul for my number; he wanted us to go out on a date sometime soon if possible. I hadn’t been dating much over the last few years, but there was no reason I couldn’t begin again, and there was no time like the present. I’d been celibate for a while, too, so I was more than ready for that to come to an end.

  Mike was almost fifteen years my junior, but I was in need of a good time for a change, and I could tell Mike was surely capable of giving me that. I had only had one short encounter around that time—it wasn’t a relationship—with comedian Eddie Murphy, and that hadn’t gone well. It was early in Eddie’s success, and man, was he full of himself! I had thrown a party at Mr. Chow, the swank eatery on the Upper East Side, and Eddie had brought his bodyguards with him, which was bad enough—what was worse was that he invited them to sit down and eat, too. You don’t have your bodyguards sit down and eat at Mr. Chow alongside Mick Jagger and other celebrities. Even worse, those same bodyguards also went into the bathroom and told Mick Jagger to leave so Eddie could use the bathroom by himself. Can you believe that? Needless to say, that romantic connection ended very quickly.

  Mike Tyson was an entirely different case. He began calling me the very day we met. I enjoyed our talks; they made me feel young and vibrant again after four years of going to hell and back. Mike was a pure blast—I just loved being around his energy. He was always so charged up and ready to go.

  Along with discussions about life, we also talked about his upcoming fight in Las Vegas, and whether or not he had a solid chance of winning. If he did win, he would become the youngest heavyweight champion in history, which was a very big deal. I assured him he would win, but what did I know really? At one point during one of our long conversations, when the talk veered toward us going out on a date, I said words that even surprised me as they came tumbling out of my mouth.

  “If you win,” I said, “I’ll give you some.”

  I have no idea what I was thinking when I said such a thing. I couldn’t have been thinking straight. Mike was completely silent for a few seconds; I think he was genuinely stunned by what I just offered him.

  Then he replied, “OK, deal.”

  Days later, on November 22, 1986, Mike stepped into the ring with Trevor Berbick at the Las Vegas Hilton for what fight promoters had billed “Judgment Day.” Tyson dominated Berbick from the opening bell, and won the title with a second-round knockout.

  At just twenty years and four months old, Mike Tyson was the world’s youngest heavyweight champion.

  I was so elated for Mike. He had endured so much pain and trauma as a kid that to see him win on such a huge stage was wonderful to behold.

  Nineteen hours later, Mike Tyson was standing at my front door on Eighty-Ninth Street. I’m not sure if he had taken the red-eye on Delta, chartered a private plane, or borrowed Dorothy’s ruby slippers and clicked them to make a wish, but whatever he did had gotten him to my apartment within hours of winning the biggest fight of his young life.

  I had made him a promise, and he obviously wanted to make sure I fulfilled it. Our first time together was nice,
if not the most passionate of nights I’d experienced with a man. Mike was young and still learning how to please a woman, but I very much enjoyed it anyway. Mike was so full of excitement and vigor that it was actually contagious.

  For many weeks and months to come, we had a lot of fun. Mike was the toast of the town with his new heavyweight champ title, and I began to introduce him to many in the high society of New York. He loved every minute of it. This was not a world he had ever imagined becoming a part of given his background as a child. (By the time he was thirteen years old, Mike had been arrested thirty-eight times for a series of petty crimes.)

  One night, he fingered a diamond necklace I was wearing, looked me straight in the eye, and said, “This is pretty. There was a time when I would have snatched it off your neck. But I don’t think that way anymore.”

  Mike grew up poor, and wasn’t sure who his real father was, and kids in school had made fun of his high-pitched voice and lisp. His mother had died when he was sixteen years old, and that was when boxing trainer Cus D’Amato and his wife became his legal guardians.

  Mike told me an amazing story about the time Muhammad Ali came to speak at D’Amato’s gym one year. Mike was still a young boy, and Ali had patted him on the head as he passed him by. Mike had never considered taking up boxing before that day, but just one touch by the greatest boxer that ever lived set him on his own history-making path.

  But despite our connection, I wasn’t exactly broadcasting our romantic involvement. This was nearly thirty years ago, years before Ashton and Demi and the whole cougar trend. There was nothing cute, sexy, or attractive about being a cougar in 1986, and I knew that all too well. In truth, I’m not certain there’s anything cute about it today, given the end result of many of those younger male/older female affairs.

  But for the moment, I was having fun. I was enjoying the thrill of watching Mike walk right into all that fame and fortune the way he did, like a little kid having the time of his life.

  Anansa, too, just loved Mike to pieces, and he adored her right back. I’ll never forget the weekend he flew both of us to Buffalo because he wanted to meet my family. That was the kind of guy Mike was. He was always so fascinated by the people in his life, and he always wanted to know more about them and where they came from. He wanted to meet my parents and my siblings to find out more about what made me tick. I took him to meet my best friend, Dada, and every time we left the house they damn near threw him a ticker-tape parade.

  Mike was a true hero to the average guy who had been knocked down time and time again by life. With his heavyweight win in Vegas, he had been able to prove that he could get up and succeed. But it was not without its problems. When I took Mike by the local barbershop in Buffalo, some idiot decided he wanted to pick a fight with Mike for no good reason. I loved how Mike was able to just walk away from that fool without engaging him at all. Mike knew how far he had come and how much he had to lose.

  After a few weeks, Mike took me to the Catskills to meet Cus’s wife. Cus was dead by this time, but it was fabulous to meet the woman who had taken on the role of surrogate mother in Mike’s life. I could tell she approved of our friendship because I think she could tell I wasn’t out to take advantage of Mike. I learned a lot about Mike by visiting the home where he’d spent much of his late teens. In his room, there were still tapes of fights by legends like Jack Johnson, Muhammad Ali, Larry Holmes, George Foreman, Leon Spinks, and many others. He had studied them constantly, and had learned every boxing move. He took his craft seriously. Mike was much smarter than most people ever gave him credit for, and over the years that served him well.

  I’m sure our families knew we were dating, but no one really said anything, so our love life was still pretty low-key. I didn’t need ridicule or judgment about any of my decisions at this point in my life. I just wanted to have a good time with a man who seemed to enjoy being with me. Mike didn’t have an agenda, either, from what I could tell, and that alone endeared him to me very much.

  That said, there were moments when I felt more like his mother, and goodness how I hated those feelings! One evening, over dinner at Mr. Chow in New York, he was drinking so much champagne that I couldn’t stop myself from asking him to slow down. He responded by opening his mouth wide to reveal that it was filled with food, just like a kid would do. I couldn’t do anything but laugh. When I felt uneasy about that part of our relationship, Mike would sense it and calm me down by singing me the Ready for the World song “Love You Down.”

  It never really mattered too much to me

  That you were just too darned old for me.

  All that really mattered was you were my girlfriend.

  Mike couldn’t sing worth a damn, but he made his point and I loved it.

  Eventually, reality set in, and Mike’s fame began to open doors for him to meet other women. We continued to see each other here and there and enjoy evenings together, but I could tell the initial thrill was gone.

  At one point, Mike began dating Naomi Campbell, which didn’t bother me because I knew how that was going to turn out. I’d been around Naomi enough to know her taste in men, and Mike didn’t exactly fit, no matter his fame or fortune.

  For example, at one event I had overheard Naomi in a heated exchange with Robert De Niro (her beau at the time) during which she demanded he buy her a building. A building—I love Naomi! That girl knows how to ask for what she wants, and I’m sure she gets it most of the time. But Mike wasn’t that guy, and more than likely he was never going to become that guy. Theirs was a short-lived affair; Mike even called me a few times to discuss it, and I just listened as a friend would do.

  But my heart would break the next time he wanted to talk about a lady friend. Mike called me up to tell me that he was madly in love, was ready to get married, and wanted my approval.

  The woman’s name was Robin Givens, and he wanted me to say it was OK.

  It wasn’t OK, not just because I had feelings for him—I did—but because I also knew Robin. I won’t disparage her here; I don’t have to, since it’s well documented how that particular love match between Mike and Robin turned out. Suffice to say it was a horrible nightmare for Mike in every way possible.

  But Mike didn’t want to hear the cold, hard truth about the woman he wanted to marry, so I didn’t give it to him. Instead, I told him that if he was in love, he should follow those feelings wherever they led him. Mike had other friends who did try to tell him to run the other way from Robin, but he didn’t heed their advice.

  My mother told me much later on in my life that she knew both Billy and Danny were wrong for me, but she also knew I was in love with them and that meant I was going to marry those men no matter what anyone said to me. I would just have to learn for myself. It was the same with Mike Tyson.

  I didn’t hear from Mike for a long while after his marriage to Robin ended. I assumed he was too embarrassed to even discuss it, particularly that infamous Barbara Walters interview where he seemed comatose and heavily medicated. I never believed he was bipolar, for the record. Maybe Mike was depressed, but who the hell isn’t depressed from time to time in this life?

  It didn’t take Mike long to break my heart yet again after his divorce from Robin. This time it was over the 1991 rape allegations. That rape case divided the black community and captured national headlines. Many in the black community sided with Mike, choosing to place the blame on the eighteen-year-old-girl. But even though I loved Mike to pieces, I wasn’t in the room that night with the two of them and have no clue what actually happened. The hospital reports said the girl’s physical condition was consistent with that of someone who had been raped, and as a woman, I had to accept and respect that finding for what it was, the very same way I would want it accepted and respected for me, or my daughter, or my granddaughter.

  I hated to see Mike go to jail and lose years of his life behind bars, but like it or not, very bad decisions had been made. What I really regretted was that there hadn’t been anyone around hi
m to guide him away from danger. Mike needed people around him who would prevent him from getting caught in the wrong places with the wrong people at the wrong time. When you’re at his level of stardom, there are so many people wanting things from you that it’s important to have someone watching your back. It’s so easy to make a misstep and screw up your entire life. And Mike Tyson never had that someone.

  I didn’t speak to Mike during the years he was in prison, or for years after he was released—our paths simply didn’t cross. I winced at the news of his biting Holyfield’s ear, and at the numerous bankruptcies. The large tattoo on his face confused and saddened me, too, as did the death of his four-year-old daughter.

  Yet Mike continues to thrive, with Broadway plays, HBO specials, and bestselling books. I glory in that. When he was sentenced to jail more than twenty years ago, I wasn’t sure where Mike would end up. I worried how he would fare under such trying circumstances after the troubled childhood he’d had. To see that he has emerged even stronger after so many battles has cheered my heart. He was a fearless kid, a brave young fighter, and an even stronger man. I’m more proud of him than ever.

  The next man in my life would prove to be much more of a conundrum than Mike. His name was Benny, and the story of his teen years were used as the basis of the popular nineties show starring Will Smith, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

  Benny was the son of a well-known jazz drummer, Ahmad Medina, and he grew up in the ritzy 90210 zip code, where he attended Beverly Hills High School. There, he met Kerry Gordy, son of famous Motown founder Berry Gordy, and they became fast friends. Benny would often spend nights at the Gordy home, and those years of hanging out with one of the richest African-American families in Beverly Hills seemed perfect for prime-time television. The show began filming while Benny and I were dating, and I watched in awe as it became a bona fide hit.