Sylvia Hill, a plucky professor of criminal justice from the University of the District of Columbia, joined the board of TransAfrica and opened a whole new front in our campaign. She organized a year of daily demonstrations in front of the South African embassy in Washington. Every day for a year, beginning on November 21, 1984, students and others demonstrated, were arrested, charged, released, and demonstrated again. To lawmakers in Washington, those demonstrations were a constant reminder of their collusion with apartheid South Africa.
My own role was to use my celebrity in any way I could. Along with helping create and guide TransAfrica, I set up a foundation to help students from Africa and the Caribbean find opportunities for higher education in the United States. As with the Africa airlifts, we were educating a next generation of activists who, with luck, would help run their country one day soon. At the same time, I lobbied at the highest levels. Along with talking to corporate leaders like Carl Ware, I went several times to London to strategize with Oliver Tambo, the president-in-exile of the African National Congress. I met with Sweden’s Olof Palme and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau of Canada. We began to build these zones of international alliance.
There was just one thing I couldn’t do: go to South Africa. I applied for a visa several times but was always turned down. I can’t say I was surprised. I knew that the only black visitors allowed into South Africa—aside from a few corporate big shots like Carl Ware—were servants bonded to white masters. I’d learned that back in 1951, when Sidney went to South Africa to make the film of Alan Paton’s novel Cry, the Beloved Country. The only way he could enter the country—as a co-star of the film—was as the bonded servant of his director, Zoltan Korda.
Still, I kept applying, just to see.
I was doing more for causes—and giving fewer concerts—but not all my doings were altruistic. Even as I was orchestrating sanctions against South Africa in the early 1980s, I was nursing visions of a killing in Caribbean real estate, and I knew just the partner to take on: Roger Moore, a.k.a. James Bond.
Roger and I had met through our mutual addiction. He loved gambling too much, and so did I. We stood at many a blackjack table together in the south of France, but where we really cut loose was Aruba. Roger at the time was married to an Italian actress named Luisa Mattioli, whose rolling Italian accent I can hear still: “Rrrroger, darrrrrling …” We spent Christmases there together, they with their children, Julie and I with ours, and when we weren’t losing in the casino, Roger and I were casing sandy coves on the nearby island of Bonaire.
Our Pied Piper was an Aruban named Maurice Neme, who seemed to have a lot of sway with the local government. He took us out to the tiny, uninhabited islet of Klein Bonaire, off Bonaire’s west coast, a gathering place for flamingos, and told us that with his connections, we could buy it and turn it into the next big Caribbean resort. With Maurice registered as our local agent, I handed over a $45,000 down payment on the islet’s insider price of $450,000. Roger, whose gambling losses were equal to mine, put in a more modest amount. Maurice had plans drawn up for what he’d taken to calling the “Largest Private Island in the World”: more than three thousand residential lots, a shopping center, hotels, yacht clubs, a heliport, and more, even a bridge to Bonaire.
Up in New York, I spread the plans out on my dining room table and marveled: Here I was, a poor boy from the islands, building my own island paradise. So excited was I by Maurice’s progress reports that I decided to fly down and see for myself. The local flora and fauna of Klein Bonaire were just as before, the sandy coves untouched. Only my money appeared to have undergone a change: It was so fully invested that I couldn’t find it!
I bought Maurice’s reassurances that time. But when I came back and found nothing more had been done, I told him we had to talk. When Maurice started making excuses, I called a couple of friends who had a way with these matters, and they paid Maurice a visit. Shortly afterward, my money reappeared, as did Roger’s. That was the end of our island paradise—though in retrospect, it was all for the best. Certainly Maurice Neme must have thought so: On the eve of the new millennium, the government of Bonaire bought Klein Bonaire from him for $9 million. More important, the purchase established it as a preserve in perpetuity. The flamingos will keep their home, and the local flora and fauna will stay as they are. So will the coral reefs, whose fragile state we were naïve about when we drew up our plans.
I still had island fantasies. I just moved them from Bonaire to Jamaica, prompted by Prime Minister Michael Manley, who spent an evening bemoaning to me his island’s financial straits. Jamaica had done a lot to develop its bauxite industry, but was still a tiny player on the world economic stage. Maybe as a native son of sorts I could think of some new Jamaican enterprise to get behind. I told Manley I could. Ever since my boyhood days on the island, I’d been fascinated by New Seville, a hunk of land on the northern coast, so named by the Spanish in 1509 after Christopher Columbus shipwrecked on the southern coast. While waiting for his ships to be repaired, Columbus wrote the tenets of slavery that would guide slave traffickers for centuries. Tens of thousands of Taino Indians on Jamaica and neighboring islands died, either from slavery or disease; the British then brought tens of thousands more slaves from Africa, unloading them right there at Ocho Rios to work the sugar trade. Nearly all those slaves began their awful voyages from somewhere near the Niger River, which snaked through most of West Africa. One of the sources of the Niger, as Sékou Touré had taught me, was the Djoliba. I proposed having a ten-day annual Djoliba festival in Seville, for all the countries of the slave trade’s diaspora: Africa, Cuba, Brazil, Haiti, Jamaica, and more. We’d re-create one of Columbus’s ships and celebrate our international alliance as the descendants of slaves. There would be musical acts from all those countries, and endless native food. I’d be enriching the culture and economy of my parents’ ancestral home. Not only that, we’d make a profit! When Manley said yes, I got Ted Turner to agree to come in as a partner and, with some of his senior staff, we started gearing up.
None of it came to pass.
Why? As part of the deal, Manley’s government had to upgrade the roads from Kingston to Montego Bay and Seville, to put in new infrastructure, accommodations—all the necessities for hosting a gathering of thousands. Manley’s untimely death from cancer brought progress to a halt, and neither his government, nor that of his successor, P. J. Patterson, managed to deliver on Manley’s—and my—dream.
Great name, Djoliba, but maybe it was time to give it a rest.
I was in Europe, on tour, when my sister, Shirley, called to say our mother had vanished. Shirley and our brother, Raymond, the children my mother had had with her second husband, Bill Wright, had grown suspicious when their calls to her little apartment on 143rd Street and Convent Avenue went unanswered. When they’d determined that she wasn’t lying hurt or dead in the apartment, they called the police. The police had no record of a Melvine Wright. Shirley and Raymond feared the worst, and so did I.
For some time after my mother left Bill Wright in L.A. and settled into her Harlem walk-up, I’d tried to move her into a larger apartment. We’d gone around with brokers, looked at dozens of prospects, but my mother found something wrong with every one of them. I had to acknowledge that my mother, in her deep depression and ever-worsening self-pity, simply wanted to keep feeling bad, in the humblest possible abode, with a bathroom down the hall.
Years had passed. All that time, I sent money. That, she accepted; after all, she had no other source of income. Occasionally we would meet for grim restaurant dinners that left me as depressed as she. I’d made one last effort to make her happy. I told her I’d buy her a house in Jamaica, right in her home parish of St. Ann. It would be in her name, and it would come with a groundskeeper and two other staff people who would live in cottages in the back. I’d give her a car and driver, too, and a thousand dollars a month, a small fortune in Jamaica. “And you can share the place with your sister Claire,” I added, reminding
her of the sibling in her large, scattered family whom she’d always liked the most. “Me? Live with Claire?” she exclaimed. “Have you gone crazy? Live with that?”
The last time I’d seen her, I was furious with her. My grandmother Jane was near death, at the age of one hundred, in Jamaica. I’d taken Julie and the children down to find her bedridden in the same hillside cottage where I’d spent my happiest childhood years. Straining to speak, Jane had implored me, “Harry, let me see my Millie one more time. I just want to look at her face, Harry. Just do that for me.” I’d promised her I would. But when I’d relayed Jane’s plea, my mother had balked. “That’s a lot of responsibility,” she’d said. “And I have nothing appropriate to wear.”
We were at a restaurant, so I tried to contain myself. “What you’re going to wear is the least of it,” I hissed.
“No, but I have so much to do these next weeks …”
Finally, in the car headed up to her apartment, I lost my temper. “Your mother may not live to see another week, let alone another year, and you won’t grant her her dying wish?”
“What are you accusing me of?” Millie snapped back.
“I’m accusing you of being the most selfish person I’ve ever known.”
“You know what these people did to me? Why should I rush out to see any of them? For what?” She started denouncing everyone in her life, from parents to siblings to husbands to children. Finally, as the car came to a stop in front of her building, she said, “I don’t need none of you as long as I got Jesus.”
That rocked me for a minute. Then I said, with a bitter laugh, “If Jesus had you to live with for a week, he’d be begging for mercy.”
She glared at me, slid out, slammed the door, and marched up the front steps of her building. And that was the last time I saw her.
When two days turned to four and then six, without a police sighting of Millie, Raymond, in desperation, went from one city hospital to the next with a photograph of her. Finally at one hospital, an orderly recognized her. She’d come in with symptoms of heart failure and registered under a name none of us recognized. It was the same game she’d played long ago, when the immigration agents were on her trail. I’m not sure she’d ever stopped playing it. Or perhaps she was too proud to call me to pay her medical bills and had no way of paying them herself. Either way, she hadn’t counted on dying; when she did, there was no one to claim her. What happened, Raymond asked the orderly, in cases like that? She was judged a pauper, the orderly explained, and buried in a paupers’ field.
We retrieved her body—by number, not by name—and together we had her reburied in a proper coffin in Woodlawn Cemetery in Queens, in a plot adjacent to Dennis’s. As painful as this was, my half brother then made it all worse. For reasons I never understood, Raymond had resented me at least since his adolescence, when I’d arranged for him to work on a kibbutz in Israel, an experience I hoped would be inspiring for him. Instead, he came back fiercely angry, denouncing the country, its people, and its politics. He had a newfound American patriotism, but with a bitter edge. When I offered to pay his college tuition, he told me he wanted nothing to do with me, and took a job with the U.S. Women’s Chamber of Commerce, which perfectly fit his increasingly conservative politics. I was genuinely mystified by what had stirred this rage, but did as he wished and kept my distance—until our mother’s tragic death. In its aftermath, Raymond decided that I was to blame. And he didn’t just voice this sentiment in private. He went to the tabloids and persuaded a reporter to run with a story on Harry Belafonte, the selfish celebrity who let his mother be buried in a paupers’ field. I’ve always meant to ask him where was he during Millie’s last days, or, for that matter, her last years.
As dire as the plight of South Africa was in the fall of 1984, and as much as was being done for the sanctions movement, an even more immediate crisis faced much of the rest of the sub-Saharan continent. Almost no one outside of Africa knew it until a seven-minute BBC news story aired in the U.K. on October 24. A horrifying famine threatened to kill at least eight million people in Ethiopia; the images of skeletal, dying children were almost too painful to bear. In Ireland, a rock singer and songwriter named Bob Geldof watched the report and felt forced into action. He talked many of Britain’s hottest musicians into forming a onetime charity group called Band Aid to make a fundraising single called “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” The song raised millions for famine relief. When Tom Brokaw aired the same report in the United States on NBC, I had a similar reaction. Inspired by Geldof’s example, I started making calls. I had no idea that what I was doing would lead to a global phenomenon. I just knew I wanted to help.
Like Geldof, I wanted to round up top musical stars and get them to collaborate. A single, an album, a concert—I wasn’t sure which. I just knew that this was where my power lay, and I wanted to use it. I needed a younger generation of artists, the ones at the top of the charts right now: Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Kenny Rogers, and Cyndi Lauper. When I looked at the management of most of these artists, I kept seeing the same name: Ken Kragen. I remembered that Ken had been singer-songwriter Harry Chapin’s manager, too. I’d met Harry quite a few times before his tragic death in a car accident in 1981, and admired his dedicated attempts to end world hunger. It wasn’t some image-polishing exercise with Harry; he was the real thing. Channeling Harry’s spirit, I called Kragen in Los Angeles and laid out my hopes.
Ken was polite, but noncommittal. He saw a lot of hurdles. Maybe too many. But I kept calling, and finally I flew to California to meet him. Still a bit reluctant, he called the one of his clients I most wanted onboard: singer-songwriter Lionel Richie.
Lionel said yes.
Now the pitching got a whole lot easier, and Ken started to get excited. His next call was to Kenny Rogers. Kenny said yes. Then Quincy Jones.
Quincy said yes.
Now I knew we were on our way. Quincy had all the credentials; he wouldn’t just lend his name and spin a few dials in the recording studio. Quincy would take charge. He was a leader. And no one would say no if Quincy were involved. If there was any doubt of that, Quincy dispelled it by making two calls of his own: to Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder.
Michael and Stevie said yes.
Of that core group, Michael was the hottest. After Thriller, the album that had finally broken my record for most weeks on the Billboard charts, he was the hottest artist alive. As I came to realize, he was also one of the spaciest.
That was all right. In early January 1985, Lionel and Michael began meeting on their own, struggling to come up with … not a song, exactly, more like an anthem that would work best when sung by a large group. Lionel came up with the opening lyrics, “We are the world / We are the children,” and a working melody. Later, on his own, Michael tinkered with the musical structure, added some lyrics, and came up with a nearly complete draft. On the night of January 21, 1985, the two sat together again to refine what they had.
At Kenny Rogers’s recording studio on Beverly Boulevard, Lionel and Michael laid down a rough track for the dozens of singers and musicians who we hoped would record with them. We’d realized we could work off the American Music Awards, to be held in L.A. on the night of January 28. Most of the country’s top stars would be there for it, and could just come over to Herb Alpert’s A&M Studios in Hollywood after the show. By now we had no trouble lining up stars. Everyone wanted in. The challenge was getting all these public figures to keep the location a secret. If it leaked to the media, A&M would be besieged. A lot of stars would take one look at that scene from down the block and turn the other way. Somehow, we managed.
The star power walking into A&M Studios after those music awards was simply blinding: from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon to Kenny Rogers, Diana Ross to Billy Joel, and so many more. We’d had the luxury of choosing the world’s most popular artists.
Quincy put a big sign on the recording studio door: CHECK YOUR EGO AT THE DOOR! He’d spent a lot of time in the las
t two weeks mixing and matching the famous voices in the room for that historic recording session. Only the best-selling artists of that outstanding group would have the solos. Everyone else would be singing backup, including me. In fact, when various stars were told they wouldn’t have solos, and Quincy directed them to the backup chorus, it lessened the sting for them to see me there, too. If the guy who’d gotten this started could sing backup, so could they.
Michael Jackson wasn’t spacey that night, and he wasn’t childlike, either. All that talk about giraffes and merry-go-rounds on his Neverland estate? That wasn’t the Michael I saw that night. He was a consummate professional, utterly focused. As others drifted in, Michael reigned supreme, even over Quincy. He didn’t order anyone around. If someone sang in a way that seemed slightly off, Michael would go over to that singer on the next break and gently but firmly suggest a change in tone or breath. The stars listened because this was, after all, the song Michael had co-written. But also because he was Michael.
Security was unbelievably tight, not just to protect the stars, but to ensure that the only cameras recording this amazing event were the ones we controlled. Ken, Quincy, and I had formed a nonprofit entity, United Support of Artists for Africa (USA for Africa), through which all the money raised would be carefully allocated. We were all seasoned pros, and we knew all the income streams to be exploited here.
Outside the recording room, family members mingled in a joyous party that went on much of the night. Inside, the mood was euphoric—a kind of happiness that came only from putting self aside and harnessing all our collective talents for a higher purpose. I hadn’t envisioned this when I made that first call to Ken Kragen. I’d just known something had to be done. The way Quincy put it to the room, during a recording break, was that I was the “bearer of the dream.” With that, everyone in the room broke into the most riotous, ragtag version of the “Banana Boat Song.” I heard “Day-O” sung as gospel, country-western, R&B—you name it. It was hilariously festive, and very humbling. Looking out over that crowd, at all the warmth and love and commitment in the room, I was overwhelmed.
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