When he was finished with his friends, Lyndall dragged himself back to Mathew and Tina’s home on Swan Isle Boulevard. He’d earlier smoked a couple of joints with “Joe and them,” which was obvious by his demeanor. “You’re high?” Beyoncé asked when he showed up at her door. “Are you kidding me?”
The two then had a raging argument about his not wanting to spend time with her. In the moment, Lyndall couldn’t help but acknowledge to himself that the only reason she was able to have such a complete airing of her emotions was probably because she felt so comfortable with him.
Rather than continue to argue with her, Lyndall got up. “I’m outta here,” he announced, heading for the door.
“Oh no,” she said, “I don’t think so.”
“I know you’re used to being treated like a star out on the road, but here, in this house? Here, you ain’t no star, Beyoncé,” he said. “Here, you’re just the girl I love. Okay?”
“You don’t have to tell me that,” she said, insulted.
They parted company.
The next morning, as was their custom on Sundays when she was in town, Beyoncé and Lyndall attended St. John’s Church together. Afterward, with Beyoncé driving her gray Jag—rare in that he was usually behind the wheel—the two drove over to Lyndall’s mother’s home for a moment so that he could change clothes and they could then spend the day together. Or at least that’s what she expected to happen. However, Lyndall had already planned to spend the day watching the football playoffs with his father, Stephen. When he told Beyoncé of his plans, she said, “What are you talking about? You don’t even like your dad! Since when do you spend time with him?”
“Yeah, but I’m working on that,” Lyndall said defensively. “I already had this thing planned,” he continued. “I told you not to expect me to drop everything just because you come home for a weekend! If you ain’t down with that, you ain’t down with me.”
He then got out of the car. The two argued for about five more minutes while he was leaning into the passenger side of the vehicle. She explained she would be back in Houston for the annual Rodeo Houston show at the Reliant Astrodome in a week, but that there was no way she would be able to see him on that day because she’d be too busy with soundchecks with the crew, rehearsal with the girls, press interviews, and then the show itself. After that, the group had a full touring schedule that would keep them busy through the end of March. Then she would have to go to Los Angeles to put the finishing touches on her first movie, Carmen: A Hip Hopera, for MTV. In fact, she actually had no idea when she would be back in Houston, she said. If they wanted to spend time with each other, it had to be now. To Lyndall, it felt like an ultimatum. “You know what, Beyoncé?” he finally told her, frustrated. “Maybe we should just break up, then. I mean, if you don’t have time for me.”
She looked at him as if he had lost his mind. “What is the matter with you?” she demanded to know. “We are not breaking up over this bullshit.”
“Well, maybe we are,” he said.
“For real?” Beyoncé asked. “That’s how it is?’
“Yeah,” Lyndall shot back. “That’s how it is.”
Lyndall backed away from the Jag. Beyoncé put the vehicle in reverse, stepped on the gas, and peeled away without looking back.
She of Little Experience
Lyndall tried to smooth things over. He telephoned her constantly, hoping to reconcile with her. “Yo, Kelly! Tell Beyoncé to call me,” he kept telling Kelly Rowland. “Boy, stop!” Kelly shot back. “She doesn’t want to talk to you. So step off!”
“He has his nerve, throwing you shade,” Solange said in front of some friends. “I’ll go over there and show him what’s what, if you want me to.”
At fifteen, Solange was five years younger than Beyoncé, but in recent years she had also become her greatest champion. “If someone has a problem with my sister, that person has a problem with me,” she liked to say. She was feisty, no one’s pushover. As they got older, she and Beyoncé could not have been more different. Whereas Beyoncé often had trouble expressing her emotions, Solange was easily able to access her anger. Also, whereas Beyoncé had very few friends, Solange had an extremely busy social life. She had her own ideas about styling, too. Beyoncé was more than happy to adhere to Tina’s advice when it came to the clothes she and the girls in her group wore and how they did their makeup, but not Solange. She had her own fashion sense—and usually it confounded Tina because it was so unusual. When Kelly broke her toe during the Christina Aguilera tour, Mathew finally let Solange into the group to replace her for a few shows. That’s when Solange knew she didn’t want to be in Destiny’s Child, or in any other group, for that matter. She was more than satisfied to be one of the group’s backup dancers, and even then she had a mind of her own.
In 2001, when Destiny’s Child performed at an NBA Finals game in Philadelphia between that city’s 76ers and the Los Angeles Lakers, Beyoncé, Michelle, and Kelly showed support for both teams by wearing a mixture of their colors and logos. However, Solange and another girl danced behind Destiny’s Child in yellow tops and purple shorts, which are Lakers’ colors. At the end of their performance of “Bootylicious,” the whole ensemble was roundly booed. Piqued, Solange raised both hands to the audience and hollered something—it’s not clear what—making it clear that she was annoyed. Later, she would report that she was taken to task for the small outburst. She didn’t say by whom, but one would imagine it was by Mathew. “This is where I got in so much trouble for pop’n off,” she said. “They boo’d us. At the end I put my hands up and was like, ‘booooooo’ back at ya’ll.” (Solange wasn’t the only one who showed her displeasure in the moment. As the audience jeered, Beyoncé raised her mike above her head and appeared to surreptitiously give the crowd the middle finger!)
“She beats to a different drummer,” is how Mathew put it in speaking of Solange, who, like Beyoncé, says, “I was fortunate to grow up in a mecca of incredible women.” She later told writer Michael Hall, “I never defined myself by my sister. I have my own musical ideas, and marketing ideas, and imaging ideas. I have had arguments with my dad about the meaning of success. His meaning: at the end of the day, having something to show for how hard you worked—a wonderful home and wonderful family. My meaning: At the end of the day, I want to feel good about what I’m doing. No regrets. I want to love what I do.”
In 2001, Solange sang the title song for the new animated television series The Proud Family, backed by Destiny’s Child. It sounded exactly like a DC performance, though, and stylistically, Solange resembled her older sister. It would still be some time before she would find her own definition of herself.
“I could make him real sorry,” Solange said of Lyndall, “that chump.” Beyoncé asked her sister to please just stay out of it. Most people in their circle felt Lyndall was lucky Beyoncé didn’t ask Solange to fight this particular battle for her.
After a few weeks, Lyndall finally stopped trying to reach Beyoncé. “All the while when we were fighting in the driveway, I was like, ‘She ain’t goin’ nowhere. I got this,’ ” he would recall many years later. “I knew marriage was very important to her. Because we had always had this agreement that we’d end up married, I guess I was overconfident. But then when she was gone, she was really gone. I couldn’t believe it.”
“You don’t need to be thinking about Lyndall anymore,” Mathew told Beyoncé. “It’s run its course. These things don’t last forever,” he told her. Of course, he knew Beyoncé was heartbroken, but the fact remained that she’d only had one boyfriend in her lifetime. Tina thought that maybe it was time for Beyoncé to play the field a little and see other fellows, and Mathew had to agree. “But not too many, because we’ve got a lot of work to do,” he warned her. He definitely did not want her distracted by romance at this time in her life.
“She wasn’t boy crazy anyway,” recalled Destiny Child’s voice teacher, Kim Wood Sandusky, who spent a great deal of time on the road with Beyo
ncé. “The three of them, Kelly and Michelle included, were looking for a man that would be in for the long term, who would grow old with them, have children, a family. They weren’t out to just play around.
“I remember we were in New Orleans, leaving on a bus for Houston, when we got into a deep spiritual conversation about their potential mates,” Sandusky recalled. “They were Christian girls who believed they’d meet their mates in God’s time. I didn’t know what the status was between Beyoncé and Lyndall. I felt, though, that it was a probably a first-love situation that had run its course.”
In years to come, Beyoncé would be linked with the rappers Nas, Marques Houston, and Sean Paul, and actor and hip-hop artist Mos Def. She was even linked to basketball player Kobe Bryant, as was Kelly Rowland before her. However, Beyoncé would never have any sort of significant relationship with any of those men, despite what some would like to believe. In many ways, she was sheltered and protected, but by her own choosing. “I’ve always been very, very specific and very choosy—very choosy—about what I do with my body,” she said in December 2014 in a short film she made entitled Yours and Mine, “and who I want to share that with.”
Consider this: Beyoncé was with Lyndall Locke and loyal to him from the age of twelve to about nineteen. She loved him, and there was no way she would ever cheat on him. As she got older, she remained as devout as ever in her Christian beliefs that simply would not allow her to be promiscuous—not that she had any desire to be, anyway. “She was overseas somewhere, and she thought, ‘I need to go to church,’ ” recalled her godmother, Linda Thomas, when speaking of Beyoncé’s religious devotion, “so she jumped on an airplane and came to Houston to go to [St. John’s] church, which says a lot for the church and a lot for her.” Buttressed by her faith, she was more than satisfied with one boyfriend and never questioned her monogamy to him, no matter how many eligible and maybe even more suitable men were after her, especially after she became famous.
Then, at pretty much the same time it was over with Lyndall, another man would come into Beyoncé’s life and she would be with him exclusively—as she is to this day. There would be very little lag time between the two paramours. Or, as Lydia Locke put it, “There was nobody between my son and the next man in Beyoncé ’s life. She went from A to B . . . and that was it.”
First Screen Kiss
Beyoncé wasn’t happy, and it wasn’t because of Lyndall Locke, either. At least not in this moment. Standing before director Robert Townsend in her cream-colored silk robe, her face free of makeup and her honey-blonde hair pulled back from her face, she appeared even younger than her twenty years. Townsend had been wondering why she hadn’t been on the set of Carmen: A Hip Hopera. Usually she arrived before everyone else, eager and ready to work. Though she’d never acted before, she was more than game. No matter how demanding a scene—crying, arguing, rapping, and even dying—she persisted in it until it was as close to perfection as possible. Today’s challenge, though, seemed insurmountable to her, as Townsend would learn after he found her brooding in her dressing room. “I’ve had this day on my calendar for a month,” she told the director. “Today’s the day I have to . . . kiss him.” She was referring to her love interest in the movie, the twenty-six-year-old, ruggedly handsome Mekhi Phifer. “I don’t think I can do it,” she said.
“But I believe you can,” Robert told her, putting his hand on her slim shoulder. “I know this is your first kissing scene, but I can help you with it.”
“Do I really kiss him, though?” Beyoncé asked. “I mean, does he have to put his lips on mine? And . . . um . . . do I have to put my tongue in . . . you know? . . . his mouth?”
“Well, yeah,” Robert answered. “I mean, it’s got to look real, Beyoncé.’ ”
He couldn’t help but be a little astonished by her innocence, her naïveté. After all, like most people, Townsend had been enthralled by her music videos and television appearances in which she looked anything but chaste in tight leather miniskirts and low-cut silk blouses. Getting to know her for the last few weeks, however, Robert came to understand that her seductive video and stage performances were all the result of smoke and mirrors. The truth about her was that not only did she have no real acting experience, but she seemed painfully short on life experience too. True, she could project herself in a tantalizing way in a music video, but being filmed while actually kissing a man? That was a stretch. “But it’s all part of acting,” he told her, his tone reassuring. “You’re a beautiful woman,” he added, stating the obvious. “You’re going to do a lot of love stories in your career. Try this: We use a term called substitution,” he continued. “If you’ve had a boyfriend in the past, pretend Mekhi is that guy. Kiss him as you would your boyfriend.”
From the expression on Beyoncé’s face, Townsend recalled that her wheels seemed to be turning. Of course, she could use her most cherished memories as he had suggested. “How often do I have to do it?” she asked.
“If you give it to me really good, we may only have to go with three takes,” Robert said. “But I need it to be right, Beyoncé,” he warned her. “You can’t just kiss him on the cheek. It has to be passionate.”
“Okay,” she decided. “I’ll do it.”
After two hours of hair and makeup, Beyoncé was on set with about forty technicians—cameramen, key grips, lighting people, and the rest—staring at her, not to mention the cast. The scene began. Trying to ignore everyone, she locked herself into a determined embrace with Mekhi Phifer. Then, as her hands began to caress his head, she went in for the kiss. It was tentative. “Cut!” Robert exclaimed. “One more take,” he declared. “You’re holding back with your tongue,” he told her. “I need more tongue.” Beyoncé cringed. “Oh my Lord,” she muttered. But she also nodded, determined to see it through.
Take two was better. “Cut! Make it juicier,” Robert said. “Take three.” She went for it again, this time fully committing, wanting to please. As she caressed his head, she kissed Mekhi with more passion than she probably thought possible in front of a camera. “Cut!” Townsend said with a big smile. “Not bad,” he added, seeming happy.
There would be two more takes—one just because her mane of hair got in the way of the shot. Then, finally, it happened with take six—the kiss everyone had been waiting for, the “money shot”—and it was definitely worth the wait. Beyoncé kissed Mekhi as if the two were truly in love. It was intense, it was genuine . . . it was great. “Cut,” Townsend said when the scene was over. “We have it now! Good job, Beyoncé! Amazing.”
“Dude! Get her off me!” Mekhi Phifer exclaimed. Feigning panic, the actor extricated himself from Beyoncé’s hold, causing everyone on the set to dissolve into laughter. “I’m out here trying to be a professional,” Phifer, a real ham, continued to gripe, “and this girl, she’s all over me. Somebody tell her we’re supposed to be acting here! I mean . . . doggone!” By this time, Beyoncé was doubled over as well. “That wasn’t so bad at all,” she said, clearly relieved.
Carmen: A Hip Hopera
The vehicle chosen for Beyoncé’s acting debut, the television movie Carmen: A Hip Hopera, was a made-for-cable movie based not only on Georges Bizet’s famous 1875 opera, but also influenced by African-American adaptations of Carmen from 1943 (on Broadway, starring Muriel Smith and Muriel Rahn alternating in the lead) and 1954 (on film, starring Harry Belafonte, Dorothy Dandridge, and Pearl Bailey). The rest of the cast of this MTV version included the aforementioned Mekhi Phifer, Mos Def, and cameos from contemporary hip-hop stars such as Jermaine Dupri, Lil’ Bow Wow, Wyclef Jean, and Da Brat.
In the movie, Beyoncé plays seductress Carmen Brown, a vixen who becomes romantically and tragically involved with a cop, Sergeant Derek Hill (Phifer). After a series of misadventures set against a decidedly urban backdrop, Carmen—a fledgling singer and actress—dies, the victim of gun violence.
Directed by Robert Townsend, the brilliant director (and star) of 1987’s Hollywood Shuffle and 1991’s The Five H
eartbeats, the movie was the perfect setting for Beyoncé to expand her horizons. Because she sings and raps in so much of it, it felt like familiar terrain. However, the actual acting in it was completely new for her. When Townsend had suggested her to MTV, the executives were skeptical. They knew she was beautiful and talented, but they doubted that she could act. Maybe they should go for an accomplished actress? But Townsend felt it important to cast a singer in the role, otherwise they would have to teach an actress how to rap, and, as he later put it, “good luck with that.”
Though he hadn’t yet met Beyoncé, he had an intuition about her. He knew in his gut that she could pull it off just by virtue of the way she performed in her music videos. She had the right instincts. He believed she knew how to act even if she didn’t know she was doing it. So he telephoned Mathew and asked if Beyoncé might consider auditioning. He was a little nervous about even asking. “She was a pretty big star, and I was worried that she’d be insulted to have to read for a role,” Townsend recalled. “But the word back to me was, ‘Yeah, of course, she would be more than happy to audition.’ ”
Weeks later, Beyoncé met Townsend in MTV’s New York office, accompanied by an A&R woman from her label and her bodyguard. A major reason for Townsend’s success as a director is his knack for extracting the best performances from his actors and actresses. Part of that talent has to do with his understanding of people; he knows how to read them. It seemed to him that, though she tried to hide it, Beyoncé was, as he later put it, “freaking out” about the audition. He wanted to find a way to calm her nerves so that she could not only get through the audition, but also deliver her best performance.
“We’re going to do a little improv,” Townsend told his three visitors. “You guys are gonna act, too,” he told the A&R woman and the bodyguard.
Becoming Beyoncé Page 31