Bob was a native son, and the jazz he’d grown up with in Kansas City was basically the same music I’d grown up with in Harlem. The settings were similar, too. Kansas City was white, but it had its Harlem equivalents in numbers runners, racketeers, jazz clubs, bordellos, and, until 1933, speakeasies. Like Harlem, it also had its share of black gangsters. In one long evening talk at my apartment, I shared with Bob my memories of Uncle Lenny, and the swath he’d cut through his Harlem turf, running his numbers game, paying off the beat cops, and cold-cocking any who got too greedy. I loved Uncle Lenny, but I knew how tough he could be, how cruel and immoral, to keep his operation going. I thought I was helping Bob shape a character that an actor like Morgan Freeman or Danny Glover would play. I was astounded when Bob asked if I wanted to take on the role myself.
“Are you nuts?” I said. My concern was that the depth of the character’s complexity, if not portrayed in a truly believable fashion, would be a problem for the audience. My persona was the exact opposite of the character Bob had written, and I was concerned that the audience would be distracted.
I expressed my concerns to Bob, and in his own cool style he said, “Belafonte, tell me something. Who started this rumor that you were an actor?”
I glared back. “Okay,” I said. “This one’s on you.” But when shooting began, I realized I could play mean. I just had to summon that old hard streak, the one that had pulled me out of poverty.
The story was entertaining in itself—a gun moll kidnapping the wife of a powerful politician to free her own husband from the clutches of a big-time gangster (me!). But the music was even better. Bob had found some of the greatest living jazz musicians and cast them as the jazz kings of that earlier age, not just to speak a few lines but to riff. Here were modern-day counterparts of Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins, Jay McShann, and my personal angel from the Royal Roost days, Lester Young. In one scene, Bob had them engage in a “cutting contest” of competing solos. To hear Joshua Redman wail with Lester’s signature style filled me with love and regret. I could close my eyes and hear Lester say again, “Hey, Harry, how’re your feelings?”
When it came out in August 1996, Kansas City got a lot of applause. Maybe not as much as Altman’s greatest films, but enough. Critic Roger Ebert, for one, admired Altman’s “originality and invention” in Kansas City, and praised the jazz scenes as “terrific.” He even liked my performance. And so did others. To my joy, I won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for that year’s Best Supporting Actor. At the ceremony, Paul Newman was the one who gave it to me. He knew, from our Actors Studio days, exactly how long I’d hoped for validation like this. To this day, I’m as proud of that film critics’ award as I am of all my gold records.
I still gave concerts, dozens a year, but as I came up on seventy, I had a harder and harder time summoning the desire to sing the standards my audiences wanted to hear. I couldn’t cut them from my repertoire; that wouldn’t be fair. But maybe I could reinvent them.
My first thought was to dip into reggae. I’d picked up genres from around the world; why not embrace the music homegrown in Jamaica? Along with its beauty and power, reggae took on social issues. Wasn’t all that perfect for me? It wasn’t. I had boundless admiration for Bob Marley, but I saw no way to bring a stamp of my own to what he did. You either did reggae the way Marley did, or you didn’t do it at all. So I never did perform or record a reggae song. I just knew to leave it alone.
I did connect with Chris Blackwell, the music producer who’d founded Island Records at the age of twenty-two and single-handedly brought reggae to the world stage. Chris, it turned out, was a fan of mine from his early days; he’d named his record company after “Island in the Sun.” He agreed that I should leave reggae alone, but he urged me to draw up a new ensemble of “world music” players, not just for my concert tours but for a new record label that would intermingle African and American black music, cross-pollinating the two. We called our new enterprise—what else?—the Djoliba Project.
We never did get the record label up and running, but I formed an amazing new band of mostly African musicians. We rehearsed intensely for months, and then made our debut in a concert at the State University of New York’s Purchase campus in March 1997. The concert was broadcast on public television as “An Evening with Harry Belafonte and Friends,” and turned into an album for Chris’s Island Records. All my standards were in the lineup, but reinvigorated by these wonderful players and their pan-African sounds. It was a good way to enter my eighth decade. With that as our springboard, we spent much of the next three years touring the world.
About the only place we didn’t go on that tour was Vegas. My Vegas days were behind me now. I’d had a great run, but at some point, the crowd had changed and the fun had left the room. Instead of high-rolling cattlemen gambling fortunes away because they knew they’d soon have more, I saw families that had come in desperation, the kids bedding down in station wagons in the parking lot while their parents tried to stave off destitution at the slot machines. Somewhere along the way, I’d stopped being a high roller myself. It hadn’t happened overnight. It had taken a lot of conversations, over many years, with Peter Neubauer, probing why I seemed compelled to stir the very fires I most feared would consume me: the sudden loss of all my money, the sickening slide into poverty again. Unlike the cattlemen, I didn’t have money to burn, so if I went on long enough, I’d go through it all—it was just a matter of time. One week in Vegas I avoided the tables completely, and then as I played the Strip less and less, it became easier and easier to put gambling, in all its once-tantalizing varieties, aside. Life was better without it.
One day in October 2000, Julie and I walked into the Bryant Park Grill, right behind New York’s main public library on Fifth Avenue, for a joyous event: David was getting married for the third time, and yes, the third time seemed the charm.
Both of my West Coast children were there—Shari and Gina—along with Adrienne, up from West Virginia. Friends filled the festive room with its lovely park view, and former New York mayor David Dinkins officiated. As I watched the simple ceremony begin, I got very choked up. Here were all my children together in one room—a rare occasion now—thrilled to see one another, wishing one another well, gathered at what felt, to me at least, a real milestone for the whole Belafonte clan. In their own very different ways, all four were happy. But at least three of them—Shari, David, and Gina—had had their share of frustrations, and still nursed unfulfilled hopes. Life hadn’t turned out quite as they expected.
Ever since her television series Hotel had ended in 1988, Shari had struggled to find acting work. Her training was in theater production, not acting, and perhaps that showed. Or perhaps Hollywood’s casting agents had just turned to the next wave of twenty-something beauties for the latest eye-candy roles. Shari fell back on putting packages together; this actor would commit to the script she’d found if those other actors, and that director, signed on. I was constantly being asked to be one of those elements, and with pain I would have to say no. Then would come the recriminations: Why hadn’t I ever helped her in her career? Why hadn’t I ever asked her to be in a movie with me? I pointed out that I turned down other such packages, too, that my rejection of those, and Shari’s own packages, was just based on the quality of what I saw.
Weeks before David’s wedding, Shari had truly startled the rest of us. Maybe that was the point. After gracing some three hundred fashion and beauty magazine covers in the 1970s and early 1980s, she’d just appeared on the cover of one I never would have expected: Playboy. If she’d asked my permission, I would not have granted it. But of course she was far too old for that. As the magazine noted, she was, in fact, forty-six, an impressively advanced age at which to bare her physique to the world. Having last seen her nude when she was about eight years old, I was gratified to see her so healthy and fit and clearly unconcerned by what anyone might “think.” My regret was more complex. Fame had become Shari’s fix long ago, and the harder
it became to score, the more determined her pursuit of it. Playboy had given her a little buzz of attention. But now that that issue was off the stands, I didn’t think she’d be any happier for having done it.
Gina, my other West Coast daughter, had struggled to find acting roles without much success. Her work on the television series The Commish in the early 1990s had soured her on the business, or at least on commercial acting. Her search for a new line of work had led her back to me. After working as my on-set acting coach for the movie White Man’s Burden, she’d done the same for me on Kansas City, and I was deeply grateful for her help; my New York Film Critics’ award surely owed something to her. She’d also married a bodybuilder, Scott McCray, who decided that he wanted to be an actor, and landed a few television roles. Gina and Scott had a lovely daughter, Maria, born in November 1996, and by the time Maria was three, they’d decided she would be the actor in the family. Now they were shuttling Maria to children’s drama classes and auditions for television commercials. Their own acting dreams might not have come to pass, but they had a new dream, and it seemed to have galvanized them.
As for the groom, for some years after the end of his second marriage, to Anna, David had worked for Belafonte Enterprises. He’d become an excellent sound engineer, not just in the studio, but on the road; when I toured, he came with me and not only oversaw the sound engineering for each concert venue but became our tour manager. He was still under my wing, but not, I hoped, for long. Then David met Malena Knopf Mathiesen, a beautiful Danish fashion model some years his junior. Malena, like Anna, was ambitious; she hosted a celebrity profile program on Danish television, and was popular enough to have it called The Malena Mathiesen Special. Her parents were both classical musicians. David and Malena were marrying five years after they’d met. As a wedding present, I’d just given them the apartment in which they’d been living, the apartment owned by Belafonte Enterprises where David had lived ever since his return from Los Angeles. I admired how devoted David clearly was to Malena.
Of my four children, only Adrienne, my oldest, remained unaffected, in the fall of 2000, by show business and its sorrows. With wry affection, Adrienne dubbed her three siblings “the show business crowd.” She’d stayed in rural West Virginia with her growing family, and started a private family counseling practice focused on children. With her daughter, Rachel Blue, she’d also started a volunteer program for Americans to help with social needs in South Africa and the Caribbean. They focused the Anir Foundation on housing, education, HIV/AIDS education and prevention, and other health issues related to women and their families. By the fall of 2000, they were coordinating projects with President Jimmy Carter’s Habitat for Humanity. Soon Rachel Blue would take the first of many trips to South Africa to build Habitat housing. I loved all my children with all my heart, but I couldn’t help feeling a special surge of pride in what Adrienne had accomplished, and in how much she and her daughter gave back, of their time and resources, to causes I cared so much about myself.
When the vows were exchanged and the drinking began, I found myself watching all four of my children interact with their partners, and with one another. I saw a lot of love and mutual respect. All four couples seemed happy—an achievement in itself. Moreover, none of my children was doing anything hypocritical, and all four did their part to make our larger family work. When any one of them was sick, or had a setback, the others were on the case, doing whatever was needed until the situation was corrected.
As I sat there, taking that all in, I remembered the sad day two years before, when Marguerite died. Her second husband, Dr. Mazique, had predeceased her, the victim at too young an age of a heart attack. Marguerite’s death was unexpected, too; she’d gone to a Valentine’s Day dance, had a lovely time, and then, upon returning home, suffered a pulmonary embolism. I was out of the country at the time. Everyone was caught off guard. Yet almost immediately, Adrienne was on the scene, after driving from West Virginia to D.C. Shari was on the first plane from L.A.; Gina and David were on the phone with me and their siblings, helping with the funeral arrangements; and all four came to the funeral, where David served as a pallbearer. The family, in short, pulled together without a moment’s hesitation.
That meant a lot.
In 2001 I was seventy-four, but I was still doing everything and trying to balance it all. I still toured; I was out on the road up to one hundred days a year. I tended to play college campuses rather than Vegas now—though I did still play Caesars—because in those venues I could try out new African and Latin music, natural outgrowths from Paradise in Gazankulu. I couldn’t imagine surpassing it—which meant, to me, that it was a good album to go out on. And so I did. I would release a collection or two after that, but no more new music. I’d done all I could, as best as I could. It was time to let that ball fall.
To my surprise, and delight, an album I’d started planning back in 1961 did get produced at last, in the fall of 2001, but it wasn’t an album of my music. At least, not exactly. It was a gathering of songs from black culture. The idea was to track black history through its music, starting with African folk songs and work songs sung by African-American slaves to songs sung in the fields and on the chain gangs, songs of resistance and hope and despair. I would take that history right up from slavery to the Underground Railroad and the black church to the great migration of African-Americans to the industrialized American cities. I’d started recording some of the songs myself, but I’d also gotten wonderful musicians like Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Joe Williams and Gloria Lynne to lend their talents. RCA had gotten excited about it, in part because of a partnership it had with Reader’s Digest. RCA would produce the album, and Reader’s Digest would publish a book to go with it. But the partnership fell apart, and so did the project—until, in the late 1990s, an energetic music executive at BMG, Alex Miller, took on the job of sifting through RCA’s archives, and came upon a shelf of dusty recordings: my project, all but forgotten. After both RCA and Reader’s Digest had abandoned it, the rights had reverted to me. With a happy go-ahead from me, Alex Miller and my son, David, remastered all the songs and worked up a gorgeous boxed set, replete with a glossy book, wonderful liner notes, and artwork by Charles White. We called it The Long Road to Freedom: An Anthology of Black Music, and when we sent out copies to the press, the response was rapturous.
On the day of the launch, I had an early-morning live interview with Katie Couric on NBC’s Today show. Originally, my itinerary had called for me to go on to the giant J&R Music World store down by City Hall, but the television interview was over by 8:30 a.m., and the store didn’t open until 10:00 a.m., so the publicists for BMG scheduled a stop in between: a breakfast appearance at Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the World Trade Center. I was in the NBC dressing room, getting my makeup rubbed off, and chatting with Katie, who’d come back for a moment to say good-bye, when out of the corner of my eye I saw something odd on a television screen: a plane going into the World Trade Center. My first thought was that it looked like the trailer for some new adventure flick. But then we saw there were two planes, and that both towers were imploding. In just thirty more minutes I would have been in that restaurant.
The Long Road to Freedom won three Grammy nominations the next year. But any commercial hopes we had for it were smothered, of course, by 9/11. The world had more important things to worry about that fall than boxed albums, as fine as they might be.
I was, perhaps, in the minority of Americans who watched President Bush’s statements and speeches after 9/11 and found them uninspiring at best. I’d followed his administration’s opening gambits, both at home and abroad, with anger and dismay. This swaggering president, who had so little to swagger about, seemed to take a perverse pleasure in neutering the agencies that civilize our country, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the U.S. Department of Justice, whose civil rights division was literally turned on its head; instead of stopping southern states from disenfranchising black voters, it was no
w helping them do it. Tax cuts for the rich, a dizzying slide from surplus to deficit, corporate lobbyists and Wall Street bankers feeding at the trough—all this from a man whose presidency, as far as I was concerned, was illegitimate in the first place. But so far, I’d bitten my tongue. Until the morning in October 2002 when a radio host in California asked me to comment on Bush’s Secretary of State, Colin Powell.
I was still giving concerts when the elements seemed right, and had agreed to give one in San Diego, through a promoter who always did his best to ensure that the concerts he set up for me were sellouts. This time he called two days in advance to say, apologetically, that about four hundred tickets remained unsold in the four-thousand-seat theater he’d booked. If I just gave an early-morning interview to a popular San Diego radio-show host, I would surely sell those remaining seats. “Just keep mentioning the concert,” the promoter advised. What, I asked, would the host and I discuss? “Light stuff,” the promoter said. “His listeners are all driving to work; they just want a little patter to get them through the rush hour.”
At the San Diego hotel where I checked in the night before the concert, I asked for a 7:30 a.m. wake-up call, half an hour before the host was due to call in on that line. The wake-up never came. Instead, I was awakened at 8:00 a.m. by the radio host’s call. “Good morning, Mr. Belafonte. It’s a great day in San Diego, how are you beginning it?”
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