They were also convinced that Grandpa had played a lifetime joke on everybody. Like me when I was little, they thought for sure my father was only pretending to be blind. One afternoon Erin and Blair were playing quietly in the corner of the office farthest from my dad while he was talking to me. They had been looking at all the gifts, and they decided to get into one of the candy boxes. Sliding over the carpet to the table, they opened one of the boxes very carefully so that it didn’t make a sound. They almost jumped out of their skins when my father’s gravelly voice rang out, “Baby, I wouldn’t eat that if I were you. I’m not sure how old those sweets are.” He not only heard them open the box; he knew which box they were opening. They looked at each other in shock. Grandpa can see! Grandpa can see!
My father was their “funny grandpa,” full of jokes, making them giggle, and he was gentle. When they think of him now, they always remember his energy. He rarely sat still. He moved and fidgeted in his chair constantly, bouncing around like a kid. If they wanted to have a treat or play with a toy, he would let them, but they always had to ask first. He was very strict about that. They were not to take things without asking. Whenever he saw them, he would say, “Come to me if you need something, baby. Ask me. Call me.” They knew their grandpa would help them if they needed him.
As children, my daughters didn’t really understand what it meant to be Ray Charles’s granddaughters. They knew he was a singer, of course. They listened to him in the studio and on records at home, and I took them to several of his concerts. Sometimes they watched from the wings; other times they sat in the audience. They loved his music, but to them, he was just Grandpa. They couldn’t figure out why other kids would ask to see their rooms when they lived at Southridge or seemed fascinated by the tile mosaic of a piano on the bottom of the swimming pool. Erin and Blair didn’t see our family name as anything special.
They thought they were living a normal life and that everyone lived like they did. Erin didn’t realize that she lived a privileged life until she was almost twelve. Then, people stared and pointed, just as people had once stared and pointed at me and my brothers. Eventually Erin and Blair began to realize that their grandfather was special to the world as well as to them and that the unwanted attention was an unavoidable part of being his granddaughters.
Their own special moment came when they were included in a People magazine photo shoot with their grandfather and their images were seen all over the world. Only then did they begin to realize how famous their grandfather really was. Erin and Blair would grow into their lives as the granddaughters of Ray Charles just fine.
I was extraordinarily blessed. I believe if I had remained true to my mother’s advice, I could have lived peacefully and happily with my children and spent more time watching them grow up to be the beautiful young women they are today. I fully intended to do that. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and I had started down that road the night I entered that house in Laurel Canyon and took the pipe the devil offered me. I had embarked on a path that would lead me not only to relive my father’s mistakes but to make my own.
CHAPTER 15
Sinner’s Prayer
Well if I’ve done
somebody wrong,
Lord, have mercy if You
please.
—LLOYD C. GLENN SR.
AND LOWELL FULSON
THE EIGHTIES HAD BEGUN AS A TIME OF GREAT HOPE FOR me. I finished college, married, and embarked on a life of my own as a husband, father, and businessman. The initial trauma of my parents’ divorce was behind us by then, and at my mother’s urging, we were beginning to function more like a family again. Underneath the bitterness of their divorce, my parents claim they still loved each other deeply. If my father had had his way, they would still have been married. And though my mother could no longer live with the pain of a deeply troubled marriage, she was determined to hold on to the good things that survived. We were still a family, and though my father and mother were no longer husband and wife, they were still our parents. As the pain of the divorce began to subside, my father found it easier to be a part of our family again. But despite the best of intentions, the sins of the father are all too often an affliction passed on to the next generation. Now fathers ourselves, my brother and I would soon have to face our own failures.
In 1982, shortly before Erin’s first birthday, my brother David brought a tragedy into the family that none of us could have foreseen. After leaving college, David had begun touring with my father. At twenty-four, David was already using a variety of hallucinogens. My dad knew that David was using drugs, and he told him that if he caught him using on tour, he would fire him. David thought our father’s attitude was hypocritical given Dad’s history, but he accepted the terms for the length of the tour. Once the tour ended and the band went on hiatus, however, David felt justified in returning to his old habits. When my father found out David was using again, he reminded David of the “no drugs” rule and promptly fired him. David was furious. He thought his behavior while they were on hiatus was his own business. He lost his temper and called Dad a hypocrite. A nasty argument followed, and David stormed out.
Still angry, David turned his anger into rage by using an abnormal amount of PCP. He wanted to hurt somebody, and he did. He doesn’t remember anything specific about the assault, but he retains enough of the memory to know that he committed the crime. He was arrested and put in jail to await trial. My parents were devastated. My father went to visit him and cried, asking David if it was his fault, if he had been harsh and unfair. He felt sick with guilt over his own drug habit. David explained to our father that it wasn’t his fault. David pled guilty to the charges and was sent to a maximum security prison, first to Chino and later to the state prison in Vacaville. His son, Little David, remained with my mother at Southridge. That year my family began a ritual of monthly prison visits that went on for nine years. None of us could believe what had happened, and all of us blamed ourselves to some extent. I felt I had not spent enough time with him and become so wrapped up in college and new independence that I hadn’t been there when he needed me. I couldn’t comprehend what had happened. What had happened to my good-natured brother who spent his life trailing along behind me?
Our father had been jailed briefly for possession, but those had been one-night stays in the local jail. This was nothing compared to what David was experiencing. He was surrounded by brutality, witnessing other inmates maimed and killed in front of him. My parents found themselves sitting in the same room with Charles Manson on visiting days. It was like a bad dream. If David survived and was released someday, what kind of man would he be? How could anyone survive that hell intact?
While all this was happening, I was building another kind of prison for myself. Duana had said there would be no using cocaine when we got married, but I hadn’t completely given up snorting it. I used cocaine occasionally and I didn’t pay attention to the writing on the wall. But as my marriage disintegrated and I began to lose direction, I started using more often. By the time I separated from Duana, my drug use had begun to escalate.
Things were going well professionally. I had left New York Life and was working successfully for Mony Financial. As long as cocaine didn’t affect my work, I thought I had things under control. I always waited until the girls were asleep or visiting with their mother before I used, so I didn’t think it was affecting them. But my mother had noticed a change in me, and she wasn’t pleased, to say the least. She knew I was using drugs again, and we had words about it more than once. She did not want drugs in her house. When the arguments continued, I decided to move out of Southridge and get a place of my own with my children. I found a split-level apartment in Culver City, and in the summer of 1988, we moved out of Southridge.
The girls loved our new place, and so did I. But without my mother’s presence, there was no one to notice or comment on my behavior. I quickly escalated from snorting to smoking, because it was more intense. As the weeks passed, I r
emained blind to my growing addiction. Like cancer, addiction goes into remission, but it never goes away. It grows unseen, and when it surfaces again, it seems ten times worse than it was before. The moment you allow yourself to entertain the thought of using again, you are in danger. The moment you act on the thought, you are in its grip more powerfully than ever. After years of occasional use, my body reacted badly to the drug. I often felt sick and disoriented.
One night while the girls were asleep, I was downstairs, high, when Duana happened to call. When I answered the phone, she said, “You sound funny. What’s going on? What are you doing?” I said things were fine, that the girls were asleep, but she didn’t believe me. She recognized the symptoms. A short while later I heard her banging on my door, yelling at me to let her in. When I opened the door, she could see that I was high. A huge fight ensued. She woke the girls, packed a few of their things, and took them home with her.
I was angry at first, convinced that the people around me were overreacting to a little recreational drug use. But gradually even I began to realize I was losing my grip. I had escalated from freebasing to smoking crack. When I was smoking ether-based cocaine in West Hollywood, I knew it was pure. But with crack, I could never be sure. It might have been mixed with heroin; it might be mixed with anything. One night after getting high at home, I thought I was having a heart attack. The left side of my body went numb, my heart raced, and my legs collapsed under me. I had no idea what I might have ingested. For a few terrible minutes, I thought I might die.
The drug itself wasn’t the only danger. I was also interacting with a whole new set of people. Crack wasn’t a rich man’s drug. To get it, I had to go to the streets and buy from dealers who didn’t care if I lived or died. I was no longer doing drugs in a wealthy enclave with the rich and famous. Some of the people I dealt with were extremely dangerous. I began to look for people I could use with “safely.”
It was becoming apparent to me that I was in trouble. I searched the phone directory for an AA hotline to get information about meeting locations. I finally called AA and spoke to someone about getting help, but I never followed through. I told myself that I could beat the problem myself. I believed it was a simple matter of willpower. I refused to acknowledge the feelings that had been dormant deep within me, forcing their way into my consciousness. The failure of my marriage, the stresses of the separation, and my fear that I was incapable of being a good father had brought up my most deep-seated fears. I had suppressed a lifetime of pain, so when the pain became unbearable, cocaine felt like my best friend. I felt I had no one to talk to about my feelings because some of my close friends were using, too. I was no longer doing drugs for the high; I was self-medicating. I had crossed all of my personal boundaries into a dark place, and I was alone there. In the past, getting high was something to do with friends. Now I was isolating, seeking solace and relief. It had become a compulsion to continue until I was totally out of funds or completely exhausted. One night I looked in the mirror, and for a moment, I thought I was looking at my father.
I knew I had to do something or I wouldn’t survive. I decided the answer was to go away for a while, to get clean and reflect on my life. The girls were still with their mother, so this seemed like the ideal time. I took thirty days off from work and flew to Hawaii. When I reached Honolulu, I checked in to the Sheraton Waikiki and took a room on the twentieth floor facing the ocean. The island became my refuge, and surrounded by all the natural beauty, I found peace again. Every evening I could watch the sun set over the water from my balcony. At night I walked the beaches, listening to the rhythm of the waves hitting the shore. Afterward I would lie in bed, praying and listening to the ebb and flow of the water. I would leave the lanai door open so I could hear the ocean. As the drugs worked their way out of my system, my head began to clear. I felt my body and spirit begin to reenergize. The striking natural beauty and the solitude surrounding me enabled me to face the seriousness of my situation.
I knew that if I did not get a grip on myself, my family would suffer and I could die. They were already suffering. We had been through this with my father, then with David, and now with me. If I didn’t change, another generation of Robinson children would grow up suffering from the effects of drug addiction that almost destroyed my childhood. I did not want to do that to my children. I promised myself that I would make the changes that were necessary to put my life in order. Thirty days after landing in Hawaii, I returned to Los Angeles healthy, energized, and determined to stay clean. Shortly after I returned, Duana brought the girls back. My life seemed whole again.
With my life back on track, I decided the time had come to renew my relationship with my father. I resigned from Mony Financial and talked with my father about my future with Ray Charles Enterprises. By this time I’d had some professional success and experience of my own, and I felt I was ready to work for my father. I awaited his decision with great anticipation. No one was more surprised than I was when he said yes, I could come to work at Ray Charles Enterprises and we would see how things went.
As I entered into this new professional relationship with my father, I also began a serious relationship of another kind. Walking down Venice Beach shortly after my return from Honolulu, I ran into a woman I had met briefly a while back. Her name was Kim. She seemed to be a kind person in every way, and when we began spending time together, I found myself falling rapidly in love with her. Kim and I seemed so right for each other, I couldn’t believe how fortunate I was. In only a few months, I had gone from loneliness and despair to a new relationship with a wonderful woman, to working with my father and my reunion with my daughters. Life couldn’t get much better. I was still cautious, aware that the new situation was fragile, but for the first time in a long while, I had hope. The summer of 1989 was a time of hope, of new responsibilities and expectations. The Berlin Wall was coming down. I flashed back to my trip to East Berlin years before, when the dismantling of the wall had seemed a distant dream. Everything around me was changing. My daughters were growing up. Erin was in third grade, and Blair was starting kindergarten. Maybe I could change as well and leave my old demons behind.
I threw myself into preparing for my new role at my father’s company. My first order of business was to acquire the rights to my father’s life story. The rights had been optioned by producer Larry Schiller and were about to revert back to my father. I formed a production company, Red Cap Productions, with Larry Fitzgerald, Mark Hartley, and Doug Brown, and we optioned the rights to the life story. Doug still has the original treatment in braille for “The Ray Charles Story.” Our production company negotiated a production deal with New Visions Pictures. Taylor Hackford and Stuart Benjamin would executive produce the film. With the production deal in place, I was ready to go to work. I brought something to the table as well.
My personal life was stabilizing, too. Most women were put off by the idea of dating a single father who was raising his children, but Kim seemed to accept my situation. She made a real effort to be part of my daughters’ lives and the only request I made of her was to be a friend to my children. We moved in together and she started assuming some of the responsibility for taking the children to school, helping them with their homework, and taking care of the house. I began to think of her as a partner in raising my children. It was more than I had hoped for. Once again it seemed I had found the perfect family life that I had always dreamed of.
I should have been happy, and on one level, I was. But as my life began to flourish, the more uncomfortable I became. Maybe I didn’t know how to be part of a happy family. I didn’t feel deserving of one, yet when I came home each night, they still greeted me with smiles and hugs. I didn’t feel worthy of such unconditional love. I carried a deep sense of shame for my behavior in the past. The more they loved me, the more unworthy I felt. I began to ruin joyous moments with self-doubt and fear. I was in control for the moment, but I didn’t know how long that would last.
Ray Charles Enterprises wa
s thriving. My father’s Diet Pepsi commercials were a huge success. I continued to develop my own projects. I was still working diligently to bring my father’s life story to the screen, and I had begun developing a project that became Ray Charles: 50 Years in Music, a special that I was co–executive producer on along with Greg Willenborg for the Fox Television Network. The guest stars included Stevie Wonder, Willie Nelson, Gladys Knight, Quincy Jones, and a host of other celebrities. The concept of the show was that my father would sing duets and medleys with the stars. The show did extremely well for Fox television. My father loved performing with his friends and it was a good start for my production efforts. I started RCR (Ray Charles Robinson) Productions, a marketing company that promoted and sold merchandise related to my father’s name and likeness. I designed a biographical booklet, “My Early Years,” along with other memorabilia for RCR. The merchandise was sold at concerts, on television, and through a variety of other marketing venues. The business relationship was working. My father had a tremendous amount of faith in my creative ability, and he backed his faith with action.
As time passed, though, my anxieties related to my relationship with my father began to creep into the business. My personal feelings gradually became intertwined with our professional relationship. I always arrived at the office before he did, so I would be at my desk every day when he walked in. I would sit there and hear him walk through the hall, hear his keys jingling as he greeted everyone. But he never stopped to put his head in and say hello to me. In fact, for the most part, he very seldom came around to my side of the building unless he needed something out of the wardrobe room. It started bothering me, and over time, it festered. What I didn’t know was that every day when my father walked into the building, he would ask, “Is Ray Jr. here yet?” He always wanted to know that I was there. Once he knew I was safely there and working, he would go on about his business. I didn’t find out until later that he checked on me every day. All that time I was in my office brooding, creating a problem in my own mind.
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