It was my turn to be alarmed when they chose to live in West Virginia, first for Adrienne to get a master’s degree in community counseling from Marshall University (David had already earned a law degree), then for the two of them to settle in a small town and start a family there. To me, West Virginia was a state with its own racist tradition, of the hillbilly variety. But I was as backward in my concern as Marguerite was in hers. When I visited the young couple, I heard southern accents from their friends and neighbors that made me anxious. I was waiting for the mountain men of Deliverance to storm the house. To my joy, those accents came wrapped in warmth. I kept waiting for the venom to appear, but it never did; the people of that little town loved Adrienne and David, and their mixed-race marriage didn’t raise an eyebrow.
The name “Belafonte” didn’t stir much interest, either. When Adrienne went to these people’s tables, and shared meals with them, she didn’t tell stories about her father. She had her own political activism to talk about, both local and global. Along with helping in her community, she was doing humanitarian work in South Africa, participating in Habitat for Humanity building projects. As for David, he became an overseer for the United Mine Workers’ pension fund. When Julie and I came to visit as grandparents, we saw young Rachel Blue and Brian growing up without any of the baggage—or the sense of entitlement—of having a Belafonte in the family. More than that, I came to see that the life Adrienne and David had made for themselves was a perfect coming to fruition of one of the goals of the civil rights movement: leading a peaceful, biracial existence in a formerly segregated state.
Shari had a more complicated legacy to absorb. She was the one born in 1954, as my marriage to Marguerite was falling apart. She had Mrs. Byrd whispering in her ear, poisoning her opinion of me and the rest of life, coaxing her back to her mother’s apartment on Fifth Avenue and 108th Street with ice cream and candy, TV and treats. If not for Peter Neubauer, my analyst, I might have taken some action that would have earned me an ill-fitting striped suit in Sing Sing. “Your turn will come,” he would tell me. “Never abandon her, never let Shari have the opportunity to say you weren’t there for her.”
I did as he suggested, and Shari survived the early tugs-of-war. She went to Hampshire College, then took a degree in theater production from Carnegie-Mellon University. There she started dating a fellow student named Bob Harper. Four days after they graduated, the two got married. Once again Marguerite was apoplectic. Bob Harper was white! My only concern was that Bob’s father was one General Harper, former head of acquisitions for the Pentagon, now vice president of Raytheon, the top military contractor. This wasn’t the kind of family that movement people married into. But the wedding came off well. Amusingly, General Harper and I, political opposites though we were, had written virtually the same speech for the occasion.
It had escaped no one’s attention that Shari was exquisitely beautiful. I was impressed by how little she traded on her looks; her ambition was to get into movie production, not in front of the camera, but behind it. The newlyweds moved to L.A., and Shari started working in a first-rung job in the animation department of Hanna-Barbera. Bob, who’d had hopes of working in the film business when he met her, happily landed a junior position on the business side of Twentieth Century–Fox. Almost immediately, though, Shari was discovered by Nina Blanchard, who ran a well-known modeling agency in L.A. Nina sent Shari to New York to try out for a Calvin Klein commercial to be shot by Richard Avedon. Avedon not only chose her for the commercial; he put her on the cover of Vogue. Soon enough, Shari was gracing the covers of every other stylish magazine in the United States and Europe. In the Shari era—the mid-to-late eighties—you couldn’t pass a newsstand without seeing her face: more than three hundred covers in all.
In 1983, when the producers of a new television series called Hotel offered her a regular part, I was delighted, but worried, too. Shari wasn’t an actress; she hadn’t done any of the work she needed to build an acting career. She’d just been handed this role, as a cover model with a famous surname, and told to be herself.
Shari bridled when I warned her how cruel the industry could be, how vulnerable and innocent she was, how her name might work against her as much as it worked for her. I watched her get caught up in this seduction, and I knew that she could easily become one of the victims of that culture, her values infected by those she so emulated. “Why don’t you have more faith in me?” Shari would say. “Why don’t you believe I can overcome that?” I would tell her that my concern had nothing to do with my belief in her, but with how deeply treacherous Hollywood could be. I had spent a lot of life living with the deceits and manipulation of an industry whose only real preoccupation was not with any greater humanity, despite its pretenses, but with the bottom line. I could not stand by and watch Shari with her high hopes walk into this venomous playground without at least having counseled her.
The series went on for a while, and Shari threw herself into Hollywood social circles. Then one day I got a call from Bob Harper. He was distraught: Shari had left him for another man. Shari called moments later to say it was true; she’d fallen for a fellow actor named Sam Behrens, once a Wrangler jeans model, lately a recurring character on the TV drama General Hospital.
Like Bob, Sam was white.
The pattern was unmistakable. By now, all four of my children had married white partners. I thought about that a lot. I knew I’d never told any of my children to marry white or black. Yet there was no escaping the formative role that race played in our family. Adrienne and Shari had two black parents; David and Gina were products of a biracial marriage. That fact alone had deep reverberations for all. Marguerite had told Adrienne and Shari, in no uncertain terms, that they should marry within their race. Both did the opposite. I may not have given Adrienne and Shari any counsel, other than to tell them to do as their hearts dictated, but what I did had far more impact than anything I said: I married a white woman. As one after another of these white partners appeared, I wondered if subconsciously I’d nudged my children toward the white side of the divide.
Perhaps I was acting on the biases of my West Indian heritage and its racial system. But there was another, more positive way to look at it. In Jamaica, as throughout the islands, marrying outside the tribe brought no stigma. My white grandmother, Jane, had married my black grandfather, and no one had batted an eye. In no memory I have of her does race matter at all. I like to think that I passed on that attitude, too, and that with all four of my children, race simply wasn’t a consideration in their choice of partners. If it was, that was fine, too. Then they were doing exactly what I’d been espousing in the movement all these years: bringing the races together. How, as an advocate of racial equality, could I not encourage that? But my guess is that my children were influenced far more by their environments than by race. They went to predominantly white schools; they cultivated the mostly white children of affluent parents. In the end, class distinctions were probably more determinative of their choice in mates than the skin color of either of their parents.
With David and Gina, I did have racial concerns of a different sort as they were growing up. I worried that as children of a biracial marriage, they’d encounter prejudice. Julie, recovering in the hospital after David was born, had gotten hate mail: “Congratulations on your nigger baby.” But race, as far as I could tell, wasn’t a problem for either of them. The real issue was growing up as the children of a famous father, with all the attendant privileges and pressures … and politics.
David, as my only son, probably got more handed to him, and paid a higher price for that, than any of my three daughters. Doormen snapped to attention; porters reached for his bags. He wore the best clothes, got everything he asked for; in ways large and small, David came to feel, quite understandably, some sense of entitlement. Like so many fathers of first-generation wealth, I hoped my children would benefit from all the comforts denied me when I was young. I sent them to private schools like the progressive Ethical Cu
lture Fieldston School, where biracial children were more likely to be welcomed by their peers than at perhaps any other school in New York. Yet at eighteen, after all this grooming, David decided to put his entire future in jeopardy by dropping out of the University of Connecticut, after secretly marrying a girl who came from the Dominican Republic and whose mother ran a beauty salon in Spanish Harlem.
To David’s surprise, and hurt, I took a stern line on this. I would not support the newlyweds; they were on their own. Soon enough, the harsh realities of making their way in the world without my help, coupled with a host of other problems, led them to separate. I knew David was hurt by the severity I’d shown toward him. He’d seen a hard edge to my character that he’d never known existed. It was the edge I’d needed to survive in Harlem, to find a way out, to make a success of myself when the whole world seemed to want to keep me down. I’d learned to contain it, but I’d never lost it. If all else fell apart, it was what I’d use to fight my way back again. David, I saw, had no such hard side.
Instead of returning to college, David became the second of my children to find work as a model; like Shari, he was pretty easy on the eyes. Soon he had money enough to rent his own place. At twenty-two he married again. Anna was a lovely girl, much more from his world than his first wife, very cultured and determined to succeed as an actress. David followed her out to California, which I admired; he was making quite a sacrifice for her. But modeling work was harder to find in L.A., and David soon grew discouraged.
By this point, I most yearned to see David succeed. When his marriage to Anna dissolved, I urged him to try sound engineering. As a teenager he’d taken an interest in my recording process, and I had no shortage of contacts in the field. First I put him on to Phil Ramone, the legendary producer; David started hanging out as an intern at his studio in New York. From there he went to a similar gig at Quincy Jones’s studio in L.A. Eventually I hired him as a sound engineer at Belafonte Enterprises. Perhaps, I dared to hope, David was at last on track.
Gina, my last-born child, was still in school in Manhattan when David married the first time—for a brief, agonizing time, she’d kept her older brother’s secret from us, at his insistence. Like David, she’d attended Ethical Culture. Julie and I were preparing to send her on to the upper school at Fieldston, too, when one day to our surprise, Gina said no—she wanted to go instead to the High School of Performing Arts, an alternative public school. We were so impressed that she felt so strongly, not just about pursuing the arts, but about doing it in a rigorous way, and going to a public school to do it. That led her to the State University of New York’s Purchase campus, where she took a degree in drama, immersing herself as much as I had at the New School, all those years ago.
Gina came back to Manhattan determined to act—in the theater, not in the movies. She started auditioning, and studied with one of the theater’s grand dames, Geraldine Page. Meanwhile, most of her former classmates at Purchase had moved to L.A. and started landing small movie and television roles. For a while, Gina resisted the pull. She stayed in New York, stuck with theater, but did play a significant role on a film I produced in 1984 called Beat Street, an early look at hip-hop artists that generated a soundtrack album, and then a follow-up album. When at last she did move to L.A., in about 1990, Gina landed a feature role in a new television series called The Commish. She seemed poised for success, grounded in the theater training that Shari had eschewed, the Belafonte name perhaps only a help, not a hindrance. But there was a problem. Gina’s years of Shakespeare and Ibsen, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, had left her constitutionally incapable of saying cheesy lines in a mediocre TV drama. For a while, she did the part and rolled her eyes off-set. Then she quit. Not a good career choice if you want to work in television. Though I understood how she felt: I’d done the same thing, long ago, in walking away from my budding career as a pop singer because it seemed so frivolous after all my training in serious theater.
By the early 1990s all four of my children were grown and gone, if not gone so far. Adrienne was happy and settled, Shari had a new marriage and Hollywood prospects, and David and Gina were finding their ways, or so I liked to think. But why had three of my four children chosen fields where the family name was a factor? And why, when they struggled, had they looked to me for help? What had I done to keep them from developing their own hard edges, and what could I still do, now, to see that they did?
I had no idea.
18
Nelson Mandela was still in prison, but by the early 1980s, South Africa was feeling the heat of the international sanctions movement, and I was a part of that. Which was why Carl Ware contacted me.
Oddly enough, Carl looked and sounded quite a bit like Dr. King: short, stocky, round-faced, and dark-skinned, with a deep, resonant voice. His clothes were the first sign that he was a very different sort. He wore beautiful suits, and shirts with cuff links, and elegant ties, and the softest cashmere coats. He showed up at a lot of fundraising events for black political candidates, and sowed a great deal of goodwill with the checks he wrote. But the candidates—and the rest of us—knew Carl had another agenda. He was Coca-Cola’s top black executive, president of its so-called Africa group. His job was to see that a lot of Coca-Cola got sold throughout the continent, including in South Africa. My job was to put enough pressure on Coke to shut its South Africa business down.
Carl and I met more than once in his spacious corner office at Coca-Cola’s headquarters in Atlanta. When he removed his suit jacket—a little show of informality between us brothers—I could see from the way his chest and biceps bulged under his crisp white shirt that he pumped iron. But he stuck to the soft sell, gently making the case for why dismantling the business in South Africa would hurt more than help. Look, he’d say in his confiding way, apartheid was doomed, with or without sanctions. Change was inevitable. And when independence came, the new black government would need all the international business it could get—including that of Coca-Cola. I disagreed. The government of P. W. Botha was fiercely unyielding, and the business brought by U.S. multinationals like Coca-Cola only helped prolong it. Meanwhile, I suggested, Coca-Cola was doing no favors to South Africa’s poor blacks by paying them pennies an hour to work in its South African bottling plants, then trying to induce them to spend those pennies buying Coke! So, yes, I told Carl, I would do everything in my power to see that America’s consumers, starting with its college students, boycotted his products until he pulled his business out of South Africa.
As one of the high priests of Coke, Carl had use of a corporate jet, the better to hopscotch from one to another of his African markets. Being a generous guy, he often urged me to use it. I declined. Other opinion makers took him up on his kind offer. One was Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Not wise, I warned the archbishop. “When you fly with the enemy, you lose sight of what’s on the ground.”
“But we’re going to need these companies back eventually,” Tutu said. Flying with Carl, he said, would give him a chance to win him over.
“I think the one who wins,” I said, “is Carl.”
Long before I’d met Miriam Makeba in the late 1950s, I’d been doing what I could against apartheid: speaking out about it, working with the exiled African National Congress, raising money for and giving money to the cause. In 1977 I’d gone further, co-founding TransAfrica, the first lobbying group to address African issues. A passionate young Washington lawyer, Randall Robinson, took the lead as TransAfrica’s director. Arthur Krim, the head of United Artists, was a big supporter. So was Peggy Dulany, daughter of David Rockefeller, who worked discreetly on social issues. For the first seven years, I served as co-chair with Richard Hatcher, mayor of Gary, Indiana. TransAfrica had more than a hand in creating the sanctions movement against South Africa. In the 1970s and early 1980s, TransAfrica was the sanctions movement.
We started with a lot of help from organized labor, not only because I had strong ties with its leaders but because a South Africa of poor black w
orkers who labored for pennies and had no rights was a threat to American unions. They wanted to keep U.S. union jobs from being outsourced; ultimately, American labor wanted to unionize African workers, too. Labor had political clout, but, even more, it had the financial clout of its pension funds. Was a big Wall Street investment fund in which the AFL-CIO had parked billions in pension funds doing business with South Africa? Out came the labor money. In one stroke, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees withdrew $70 billion from U.S. firms involved with apartheid. That kind of money made people sit up straight.
Every U.S. administration since 1948 had done business with the apartheid government. The Big Three automakers sold cars in South Africa, Johnson & Johnson sold pharmaceuticals, and, with Carl Ware’s help, Coca-Cola sold a lot of soda. For that matter, the Pentagon sold a lot of weapons to South Africa. So we had all of corporate America against us, as well as the military-industrial complex. But along with labor on our side, we had students. And, as Birmingham had proven, students can be powerful. By the early 1980s, TransAfrica had set up satellite groups on college campuses all over the country. America’s colleges and universities had vast endowments, and some of that endowment money found its way, directly or indirectly, to South Africa. When those students demanded that their colleges disinvest, their presidents began to listen.
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