Becoming Beyoncé

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  “Jay had his own unique demographic and it definitely wasn’t a pop demo,” recalled Choke No Joke. He was Damon Dash’s videographer at Roc-A-Fella Records from 2000 to 2005. “He’d had a pop hit with ‘Hard Knock Life’ but he was still in the demo of the urban community,” he recalled of Jay. “Aligning himself with Beyoncé, the cream of the crop of not just R&B but also the pop world, brought Jay Z into a whole other light with a whole new audience. When he got with Beyoncé, that’s when you started seeing him wear suits, for instance, instead of baggy pants and baseball caps. It started slowly, but it definitely built between 2003 and 2005. That’s when Jay started presenting himself in an entirely different way.

  “Call it fate, call it manipulation, whatever the case, Beyoncé came along at just the right time in his life,” Choke No Joke continued. “In terms of his audience, Jay got more out of the bargain than she did. Anyone who questions that she upgraded him wasn’t watching their careers from the beginning. There’s no question that she helped him get more revenue by putting her brand next to his.”

  It’s no coincidence that Jay Z became more fully involved with Beyoncé in 2003, the year his father died. By the time they returned to France in August 2003, they seemed to be on their way toward a full-blown relationship. By his own admission, Jay would probably not have been able to sustain one with Beyoncé prior to this time because of deep-seated issues having to do with his father. He would say that his resentment of Adnis Reeves for having abandoned the family when he was eleven had been responsible for many of his bad decisions. It had also closed him off emotionally. Though Jay had vaguely discussed this problem with Beyoncé, he’d decided not to dwell on it with her. He liked her and didn’t want to scare her away with too much information. He was already afraid his controversial background would be a burden for her to carry, not to mention one for her parents as well. So when it came to Adnis, he held back.

  As it happened, Jay Z’s mother understood that he would never be able to live a well-adjusted life until he once and for all settled matters with Adnis. “I remember very distinctly that I had a conversation with her in my kitchen,” he said of his mother, Gloria. “I was saying, ‘You know, Ma, I’ve really been trying to look inward, and maybe I’m just not meant to fall in love like other people do.’ She just looked at me like, ‘Hush up, boy.’ She figured out what was wrong with me, and so she planned a meeting between me and my father. I was like, ‘Ma, I’m a grown man. I don’t need a dad now.’ ”

  Of course, that meeting—in 2002, when Jay Z was thirty-three—wasn’t easy for either father or son. “He showed up, and I gave him the real conversation,” Jay Z recalled. “I told him how I felt the day he left. He was saying stuff like, ‘Man, you knew where I was.’ I’m like, ‘I was a kid! Do you realize how wrong you were? It was your responsibility to see me.’ He finally accepted that.”

  Though Jay had long heard stories about it, Adnis finally explained the true reason he left home. He said that he’d become obsessed with finding the killer of his brother and that during his fruitless search—which began when Jay was just a boy—he became addicted to drugs. His life was a downward spiral from the point on. Jay understood. In fact, this heart-to-heart with Adnis completely set Jay straight, allowing him to release many years of anger and resentment. He then helped Adnis into a new apartment and even bought him furniture for it. However, by this time, Adnis was suffering from serious liver disease, the sad consequence of a life of heavy drinking.

  On June 18, 2003, the night Jay Z and his partner Juan Perez opened their deluxe 40/40 sports bar and lounge in Manhattan, Adnis passed away. It was then that Jay began to understand that his mother likely knew that his dad was nearing the end of his life, and that there had been no time to waste in effecting reconciliation. Jay says that forgiving Adnis “absolutely” opened him up to the possibility of love in his life. It was after his father’s death that he began to fully pursue with an open heart a relationship with Beyoncé. In a real sense, it was all about timing where Jay and Beyoncé were concerned. She came in at the tail end of his reconciliation with his father and was with him when Adnis died. Therefore, she understood a lot of what was going on with him as it unfolded, forging a bond with him that was undeniable, especially since she had her own father issues.

  One of Beyoncé’s relatives recalls a conversation between Beyoncé and Jay after Mathew and Beyoncé had a rather tense exchange relating to a business deal he was in the process of negotiating for her. She was concerned about the way the matter was being handled and had several suggestions. Mathew wasn’t sure they were practical, though. After the success of “Crazy in Love,” Beyoncé more than ever had her own ideas about video concepts, music selection, and especially her stage show. She seemed inclined to question much of what Mathew proposed.

  Some thought Beyoncé would grow out of the phase in which she believed her father to be wrong about almost everything. For most teenagers, it was a natural part of going through adolescence. For Beyoncé, though, it was becoming more a way of life, especially by the time she turned twenty. Some couldn’t help but wonder if she had conflicted feelings about Mathew, possibly because of the way he had conducted himself in his marriage to her mother. It did sometimes seem as if there was some underlying issue in her relationship with him other than just professional disagreement. It’s difficult to know, though, since the family remained very private, especially when it came to Beyoncé’s true feelings about Mathew now that she was famous. She may not have been candid with Jay about them either, not yet anyway. Even Kelly, in her deposition taken during the Tillman case, was clear that she and Beyoncé never discussed Mathew’s infidelities. She said that she wasn’t one to bring such matters up to Beyoncé because she knew it was something she just didn’t want to discuss—and this was while they were living in the same house! While that seems a little hard to believe, it was Kelly’s testimony just the same, and she was under oath when she gave it.

  “I get your frustration about Mathew,” Jay Z told Beyoncé, according to the witness to the conversation. “But look at how involved your father has been in your life. I wish I’d had a father like Mathew Knowles. Jesus Christ! Who knows how I would have turned out?”

  Beyoncé saw Jay’s point, but she offered her own that it was precisely because of the absence of Adnis in his life that Jay had been so motivated to make something of himself. Jay had to concede as much. Still, he had great respect for the way Mathew managed Beyoncé and for the sacrifices he’d made for her. It was clear to him that Mathew would do anything for his daughter. It was the little things that most impressed him.

  When she got her first tattoo, for instance—a praying mantis on her left hip—Beyoncé was very unhappy with her decision. She simply didn’t like it and was sorry she’d ever done it. Mathew told her not to beat herself up about it, though. In fact, he offered to get the exact same tattoo if it would make her feel better about things. Jay thought that little story said a lot about Mathew and never really forgot it. (Years later, Beyoncé would have the offending tattoo removed by laser.)

  “For a man with no background in show business to have done what you did, it just blows my mind,” Jay told Mathew. Mathew predicted that one day Jay would have a family of his own, and when that day happened he would know that “there are pretty much no limits to what a father will do for his kid.”

  There was no tension between Jay and Mathew when they first met, even though Beyoncé may have been nervous about how her parents were going to feel about Jay’s past. She needn’t have been concerned, though. “Jay is just such a gentleman,” Tina said once she got to know him. “I’m so happy they got together. They’re two smart people, and it’s great for both of them. It’s such a great match.”

  “Great match,” maybe. But Jay was still no choirboy, and most people in the hip-hop world knew it.

  Choke No Joke recalls what happened to him the night Damon Dash asked him to videotape Jay at a concert at Manhattan Center;
this was around the time Jay first started dating Beyoncé. As the videographer shot footage of the performance, Jay seemed unclear as to whether or not he had the authority to do so. One of his handlers tried to get the tape from Choke. “Step off!” Choke warned him. But then suddenly a group of men jumped out of seemingly nowhere and swarmed the cameraman. During the ensuing fracas, someone tried to kick his camera from his hand, and when he did, his foot accidentally made contact with Choke’s jaw, fracturing it. “When I got out of the Harlem hospital—face all swelled up lookin’ like the dude from [the movie] Mask, my jaw all wired—I confronted Dame [Damon Dash],” Choke No Joke recalled. “He’s like, ‘Yo, Jay will take care of you, dawg.’ So [Jay] offered me some paper [money]. I ain’t saying how much. But if Jay denies it, I still got the check stub to prove it.”

  Brand Beyoncé

  Is my daughter here?” Tina Knowles asked the receptionist at Music World’s Houston headquarters. She stood before the employee with a sparkling, bugle-beaded black-and-white gown draped in her arms. It was carefully wrapped in plastic and probably worth many thousands of dollars. “I need her to try this on right quick,” Tina said. “I think it’s probably gonna be too long.”

  “She’s in there with Mr. Knowles,” the receptionist said, motioning to a closed door behind which was Mathew’s office.

  “How long have they been in there?” Tina wanted to know.

  “At least two hours,” answered the receptionist. “Should I interrupt?”

  Tina mulled it over. “Probably not,” she decided.

  “Could be a while,” said the receptionist.

  “Tell me about it,” Tina said with a laugh. “I’m just gonna leave this with you,” she added as she handed her glittering creation to the receptionist. With that, she took her leave. She knew that once Mathew and Beyoncé sequestered themselves in his office, many more hours could pass before either would once again see the light of day.

  By 2004, Beyoncé had entered the stage of her career where she wanted to know everything there was to know about the business behind it. Who better to teach her than her own father?

  People have always looked for some sort of complex business plan when it came to the saturation of the Beyoncé brand, but it’s not there. Mathew Knowles is an everyman sort of entrepreneur. While everything he did was of course structured and strategized, all of it sprang from his grassroots mentality as a salesman. It utilized the same philosophy that made him flourish in the many sales jobs he took on before Girls Tyme: Give the people what they want, give them plenty of it, and make sure the product is good so they keep coming back for me. By 2004, he’d made his daughter absolutely ubiquitous, bringing in untold amounts of money for everyone concerned: the product . . . the group . . . his family.

  There seemed to be no end to the ways Mathew envisioned exposing Beyoncé to the masses, great ideas such as when he had her sing the national anthem before almost ninety million people at Super Bowl XXXVIII in Houston in February 2004. A week later, Mathew had her perform “Crazy in Love” during halftime at the NBA All-Star Game. By this time, she had replaced Britney Spears in television commercials for Pepsi. She was also linked to the Tommy Hilfiger brand as well as L’Oreal, representing products used by a cross-section of consumers, with nothing offensive or the least bit controversial. Later she would become a spokeswoman for Samsung and American Express. There was also a Wal-Mart commercial that showed the girls of Destiny’s Child and the Knowleses exchanging Christmas gifts. There were countless foreign commercials, too, such as one in Egypt for Pepsi featuring Beyoncé with Jennifer Lopez as samurai sword–wielding martial artists. The group also partnered with many corporations for tour sponsorships, such as DC’s “I’m Lovin’ It” tour sponsored by McDonald’s, which featured the girls in commercials.

  Knowles told Michael Hall for Texas Monthly, “When you sell a product, you first have to design and build it, but also you have to figure out the needs of the customer. When we put the group together, we had a plan. We figured out our demographic, our customers, our imaging, what type of songs we’re going to sing. It’s not by accident that we write songs like ‘Independent Women’ and ‘Survivor’—female-based empowerment songs. That’s our customer base.” Of course, those song ideas were Beyoncé’s, not his, but as her manager Mathew wasn’t above sometimes taking universal credit.

  Despite the careful planning that went into Beyoncé’s career, there would always be the occasional unfortunate misstep. Nothing was more incongruous, for instance, than seeing her pose with a box of Hamburger Helper. She became aligned with the product (in 2008) as part of Feed America’s “Show Your Helping Hand” charity campaign. If anything, it served to put forth the impression that she would attach her name to anything if the price was right. (Not that she doesn’t use the product in her private life, because she does. In fact, she jokingly calls herself “the master of Hamburger Helper.”)

  Certainly her film The Fighting Temptations (released in the fall of 2003) also falls into that category of miscalculations. Whereas Carmen: A Hip Hopera gave Beyoncé a meaty and multidimensional role, and Austin Powers had her playing off the campiness of her Foxxy Brown character, The Fighting Temptations gave her pretty much nothing; the character she played was just a pretty young woman who could sing. It’s a full forty minutes into the ninety-minute film before she actually has a line!

  That unfortunate dud aside, most everything else Mathew and Beyoncé touched at this time turned to gold. Thus Mathew was eager to share what he learned about branding and career management with Beyoncé, though it could be said that he wasn’t always the most patient teacher. Laser-focused on and maybe even obsessive about whatever it was he was doing, of course he demanded her full attention. For instance, if he was in the middle of explaining the complex machinations of product licensing, the last thing he wanted to see was her pulling her BlackBerry from her purse to start texting Kelly. After a few false starts, Beyoncé soon began to devote herself completely to her pursuit of knowledge, taking copious notes during her time at Music World and reading as many books recommended by Mathew as possible.

  Often Beyoncé’s cousin Angie would sit in on these business meetings with Mathew. She was wise to the finer points of show business, having been on the road with Destiny’s Child for years. She taught Beyoncé to be tough and ask questions, to not take anything for granted. “I don’t want people to get the impression that I think they’re lying,” Beyoncé would say. “Well, guess what, girl? They probably are,” Angie would tell her. Many people who were on the road with Destiny’s Child have stories of the two cousins sequestered in one of their hotel rooms, reviewing accounting books and contracts. The two were known to have conference calls with promoters and with Mathew, and if there was any sort of discrepancy, most certainly Angie would find it.

  One promoter with a long history in the concert business recalls having a discussion with Beyoncé during a Destiny’s Child tour concerning the licensing of DC T-shirts being sold at the concession stand. The figures he was giving to her relating to the group’s profits didn’t make sense to her. “Hold up,” she said. “Something’s not right.” She reached into her purse and whipped out a small calculator. She hit the keys quickly and came up with a number. “This is right,” she said, holding up the calculator so he could see the computation. “Actually, that’s not it at all,” the promoter said. He took the calculator from her and did his own figures. “This right here, this is right,” he said when he finished, handing the calculator back to her. Beyoncé still wasn’t convinced. “I need to do some research on this and get back to you,” she told him. As the story goes, the promoter’s figures actually were accurate. The point of the anecdote, though, is that she was becoming the kind of entertainer who felt comfortable challenging even the most experienced person.

  So how did Beyoncé square this abundant commercialization of her image with who she really was as a person—the icon versus the person? In 2004, she hadn’t quite
figured that out yet. She was still trying to create a balance between what she wanted the public to think of her and who she really was as a young woman. It’s one of the reasons she never said much of a personal nature in interviews. It was fine with her if the public only knew of her what they saw in her endorsement deals. If all she was to her fans was a sexy girl in a poster, that was completely acceptable to her. She wasn’t sure yet who she was separate and apart from the product known as “Beyoncé” anyway.

  A cautious person by nature, Beyoncé had long before decided that rather than make the wrong statement about herself, she’d make none at all except those concerning her professional aspirations and a few platitudes now and again about how blessed she was to have her career. While she didn’t appear to be very insightful, that was primarily because she was purposely vague, each response measured against its possible ramifications. In a sense it had to do with public relations, because she definitely had an image she was putting forth, but it also had to do with something else: fear of exposure.

  Today, she still has critics who feel that she is disingenuous, or just plain “fake.” If she comes across that way—and she sometimes does—it’s really just a function of her being evasive by design. She’d rather be roundly criticized than completely exposed. Oprah Winfrey once told her that the one thing she regrets about her career is ever having discussed her boyfriend, Stedman Graham, in the media, that once she opened that door to her private life, there was never any closing it. She advised Beyoncé to keep it closed, and keep it locked. Though Beyoncé never forgot Oprah’s words, she actually had been withholding parts of herself ever since she was a child, back when the other kids in school didn’t even know she was a singer. She was raised to compartmentalize, to not share of herself, to protect her heart at all costs. “This business sucks every goddamn thing out of you,” she once told Lyndall Locke. “I’m going to keep as much of myself for myself as I can. I’m sorry, but I’m just not going to give it all away. I don’t care what people think about it, either.”