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Becoming Beyoncé

Page 53

by J. Randy Taraborrelli


  According to numerous well-placed sources, those were Tina Knowles’s words when faced with the challenge of how to address what happened in New York between her daughter and her son-in-law. The overriding principle upon which she had based her life since the birth of her children had always been that family came first and mattered most. Now that Mathew was no longer her husband, she and her daughters had reorganized with Jay Z and Blue Ivy at the core of their nuclear family. It’s not that Mathew was no longer a part of them. He would always be Tina’s first love and the father of her children. Life being complex, though, it would be easier, at least for now, for him to live his life with his own new family, his wife and her relatives. Meanwhile, Tina; Beyoncé; Jay; Blue Ivy; Jay’s mother, Gloria; Solange and her son, Julez; and eventually her second husband, Alan Ferguson, and all of their extended relatives, such as Angie Beyincé, would continue on as a family.

  Predictably, Beyoncé, Jay, and Solange were said to be embarrassed by the attention generated by the elevator incident. The best way to describe Beyoncé’s reaction would be to say that she was mortified. When someone in her organization told her that the entire escapade was on tape, she was said to be stunned. It never occurred to her that the fight was being recorded. For a woman who has been building an image for herself since about the age of sixteen “Elevator Gate” was definitely not something for which Beyoncé was prepared, even all of these years later.

  Certainly one aspect of the incident that worked in Jay’s favor is that he didn’t return Solange’s fire. Imagine if he had struck her! “He showed real class by the way he handled himself,” Mathew Knowles observed, saying, “He handled himself with respect.”

  Tina didn’t even need the details of whatever happened to cause the fight. As Beyoncé, Jay, and Solange tried to explain them to her, she didn’t want to know. The specifics didn’t matter. Families have their troubles, and she had always known that hers was not exempt. It’s just that their trouble had, more often than not, played out behind closed doors. What had never changed was Tina’s belief that when her family is in crisis, they put their differences aside and come together. In the end, it wouldn’t be up to Beyoncé’s or Jay’s publicists to fashion and then finalize a statement to address the fracas; that duty would fall on the family’s matriarch. When her daughter and son-in-law had her review what their representative sought to put forth, Tina made subtle but important changes to it. She wanted it to be honest but, of course, without explicit detail. The important thing, as far as she was concerned, wasn’t what had happened, it was how they dealt with it. “I will do what I have always done,” she said when asked how she would handle the onslaught of publicity. “I will take care of my family.” In doing so, she helped to shape and then gave her final approval of the following statement:

  “As a result of the public release of the elevator security footage from Monday, May 5th, there has been a great deal of speculation about what triggered the unfortunate incident. But the most important thing is that our family has worked through it. Jay and Solange each assume their share of responsibility for what has occurred. They both acknowledge their role in this private matter that has played out in the public. They both have apologized to each other and we have moved forward as a united family. The reports of Solange being intoxicated or displaying erratic behavior throughout that evening are simply false. At the end of the day, families have problems and we’re no different. We love each other and above all we are family. We’ve put this behind us and hope everyone else will do the same.”8

  A few months later, Beyoncé would include a reference to the elevator event in the remix of her song “Flawless” with Nicki Minaj, during which she rapped, “Of course, sometimes shit goes down when there’s a billion dollars on an elevator.” (Actually, as it happened, there was slightly more than “a billion dollars” on that elevator. According to multiple sources, Jay was worth $560 million at the time, Beyoncé $450 million, and Solange $5 million.)

  Tina’s statement, honest and direct, stood in stark contrast to what Mathew would say about the fracas. Mathew said he believed the controversy had probably been staged. Implementing old-school PR tactics, he called it a “Jedi Mind Trick,” and suggested it had been a hoax concocted by the players not only to sell tickets for Beyoncé and Jay’s upcoming tour, but to increase sales of Solange’s recordings at a time when she was also starting her own record label, Saint Records. “Don’t think it’s just a coincidence that they were getting ready to go on tour and this happened,” he said. “I happen to know that ticket sales increased after that episode, as did sales for Solange’s album, which went up 200 percent. Oldest trick in the book.”

  Mathew handled the imbroglio like the great showman. Tina handled it like the great mother—two different sides of a coin, both playing out their true natures consistent with their personalities.

  Two days later, Tina called a family summit in New Orleans. She and her daughters and granddaughter and Jay, along with Solange’s fiancé, Alan Ferguson, and her son, Julez, shared a long meal at Café Amelie in New Orleans’s French Quarter. They spent hours catching up and dining on Creole fare. When they exited the courtyard, they seemed united and happy as they posed for photographs. Of course, some thought there was a lot of media manipulation at play when these pictures surfaced in the press. That’s to be expected. As far as Tina was concerned, if their critics thought the photos were contrived, so be it. She knew the truth. Even though they still had their problems, she knew they were united in their ongoing battle to find themselves . . . as a family.

  “Alone Together in a Crowd”

  Beyoncé bent down and adjusted three-year-old Blue Ivy Carter’s collar on her little pink wool coat. The tot was also wearing a white ballerina’s tutu, matching colored leggings, and red UGGs. It was a midwinter day in Los Angeles in early 2015. Beyoncé, Jay Z, and their little girl were standing in the basement level of a high-rise office building waiting for a car to meet them and whisk them away. They’d just finished a business meeting on a top floor and were now trying to avoid the crowd of people that had congregated in front of the building. Thus the wait in the basement. It was not only damp, it was dark. Faulty fluorescent lightbulbs flashed off and on while making weird buzzing noises. Beyoncé turned to her husband. “Come on, Jay,” she said impatiently, “can we please get out of here?”

  On their way down to the lower level, the Carters, along with two employees from the firm with whom they had met, made a quick pit stop in the main lobby. While there, Beyoncé took a peek around a corner at the growing throng. “It’s just fans,” she exclaimed to Jay. “No paparazzi.” He seemed surprised; his dark eyes widened. “Great! Maybe we ain’t famous no more,” he quipped.

  For some reason, Los Angeles was always easier for the Carters to navigate. Whereas most celebrities of their status are hotly pursued by photographers in the Hollywood area, not so Beyoncé and Jay. Perhaps it’s because they’re not expected to be found here. New York is considered their home base, at least as far as most of the stalking paparazzi are concerned. Today they didn’t even have bodyguards with them, just the two associates from the office upstairs. Surprisingly, considering the intensity of their fame, they often moved about the West Coast metropolis without formal protection.

  “Jay, I’m not waiting down here much longer,” Beyoncé said. At that, he pulled his cell phone from his jacket and made a call. “Blue was fidgety, and so was her mother,” said one witness to the scene. “ ‘Why are we waiting down here hiding from our fans?’ she asked me while Jay Z was on the phone. ‘After all these years, Jay and I and Blue are used to being alone together in a crowd,’ she told me. ‘So it’s really no big deal to me.’ ” Indeed, in recent years Beyoncé had less patience for the art of what Jay liked to call “the great escape”—stealthily moving in and out of buildings without being detected. The more famous they’ve become, the less interested she seems to be in hiding.

  During the previous year, 2014, Beyo
ncé had definitely been at the top of her game. She’d doubled her earnings, generating $115 million, up from the previous year’s $53 million. The increase was in large part thanks to two major tours, her Mrs. Carter and the couple’s joint On the Run. Also generating money were her ongoing endorsement deals, not to mention her successful perfume line—“Heat,” “Rise,” “Pulse” (and variations of each scent that have generated more than $400 million in the last three years). Of course, the successful launch of her surprise album and video package substantially added to her wealth. Thanks in large part to that new music, she placed at number one on Forbes’s prestigious “Top Earning Women in Music 2014” list. In the spring of 2015, she signed new artists to her Parkwood Entertainment, young girls she plans to record and manage in much the same way she was once mentored in her own youth.

  Earlier, during their meeting upstairs, the Carters had chatted easily with secretaries and other staffers. “Even though we were specifically told by our bosses not to speak to them—someone even told me, ‘Please avoid making eye contact with Beyoncé and Jay Z in the hallways’—they were accessible to everyone,” recalled one witness. With her hair a mass of blondish waves, parted in the middle and cascading to her shoulders, Beyoncé was wearing worn cutoff jeans and a tailored bright orange jacket over a simple white blouse. Beige, strappy stilettos completed the chic-casual look.

  Someone produced a photograph and asked Beyoncé to sign it. It was a picture of her at about the age of eight, surrounded by towering gold and silver trophies, similar to one featured in her “Pretty Hurts” video. This one, though, had Mathew posing proudly at her side. A look of nostalgia crossed Beyoncé’s face as she stared hard at the picture. “Do you remember that day?” she was asked. She nodded her head. A faint smile touched her lips.

  Now, a half hour later, the Carters were still in the office building’s basement, waiting for their car. “After Jay Z made a call, he learned that there’d been some confusion and that the Carters’ driver was parked in front of the office building,” recalled the witness. “Because of the restrictions of one-way street traffic, it would take him at least twenty minutes to circle the block and make his way down to the building’s bottom level. Beyoncé wasn’t having it. ‘No way,’ she said. ‘We’re going back up and out through the lobby.’ Jay seemed taken aback. ‘You sure?’ he asked. She nodded. She said that Blue was cranky and wanted to leave. Besides, she added, ‘They’re fans, Jay! Why are we hiding down here from fans?’ Jay said, ‘I ain’t goin’ out there, Bey. I forgot my sunglasses!’ Beyoncé looked at me and chuckled. ‘He thinks when he puts his sunglasses on, people don’t know who he is,’ she said, rolling her eyes.”

  Today it’s difficult to believe that a time ever existed when Beyoncé went out of her way to not be seen or photographed with Jay, or did everything she could to make sure Blue Ivy’s face was not viewed by the public. These days she is known to post copious photos of family outings and vacations on social media. Rarely does a day go by when she doesn’t post some picture of either a major event in her family’s life or a simple moment of familial contentment. Of course, it could be said that the taking and posting of intimate family photos is just another marketing strategy—another version of herself put forth for public consumption, this time cast as a happy wife and mother. (Giving credence to this theory is the fact that she has often been accused of airbrushing the photos to glossy perfection.)

  Such constant memorializing of a life calls to mind an interesting story: In 2013, while Beyoncé was performing “Irreplaceable” in Atlanta, she walked out onto a ramp into the audience and had audience members sing the chorus with her. When she got to one fan, he was busily recording her with his smartphone. “See, you can’t even sing because you’re too busy taping,” she said, chastising him. “I’m right in your face, baby. You gotta seize this moment! Put that damn camera down!” Some cynics might be inclined to offer her the same advice, especially in April of 2015 when she posted copious pictures of her and Jay’s vacation in Hawaii, commemorating their seventh wedding anniversary.

  Maybe a more charitable way to look at it is to suggest that somewhere along the line, Beyoncé reconciled herself to her stardom and decided to relax into it. Whether altered or not, the photographs she posts do seem to suggest that she is at peace, as if she has finally merged the icon with the woman. Of course, it should be noted that, being a celebrity, she can’t help but take advantage of the public relations angle to social media. If there is a rumor about discord in her family, she immediately posts photographs that could be seen to contradict the story. This doesn’t necessarily mean the rumor is false as much as it suggests adept and continued protection of her image and that of her family. It’s a practice that resulted in her being named as one of Time’s “30 Most Influential People on the Internet” in 2015.

  With everyone in agreement, including Jay, they took an elevator back up to the lobby. As the two company employees flanked the Carters, they walked out of the building and met the scene head-on: a bevy of admirers shouting at them, some actually shrieking with delight, others taking pictures with smartphones, many thrusting forth publicity photos and asking for autographs. While Jay looked a little grim, Blue took it all in with wide, staring eyes. She was in her daddy’s arms even though she was definitely getting too big to carry. Jay held on to her tightly, pressing her head into his shoulder while shielding her little face from the bright sun. Beyoncé, a veteran of such bedlam, was completely at ease. This was nothing for her compared to the aggressive crowds of fans and paparazzi through which she and Jay are used to navigating on an almost daily basis. A small group or major mob, it’s all the same to her. She feels a unique camaraderie with her public, one that springs from the many experiences she has shared with them over the years, Whether rendered helpless by indecision, immobilized by uncertainty, or ready and eager to perform and light up a stage, she has always known she could count on her fans to be there for her through it all.

  According to one person in the crowd, when someone thrust a vinyl copy of the first Destiny’s Child album at Beyoncé with a pen for a signature, she stopped for a moment and quickly autographed it. “Do you ever see LaTavia and LeToya?” the breathless fan asked. “Nope,” she stated. “Never.” Her response was so abrupt, it took some by surprise. Then, after a beat, she added, “I mean, look, I ain’t gonna lie.” Her remark caused everyone within earshot to laugh.

  Finally, after less than a minute, the Carters boarded their waiting black Escalade. “Thanks so much,” Beyoncé shouted out just as the car door slammed behind her. Soon after the automobile lurched forward, one of its windows rolled down. As the vehicle merged into busy downtown Los Angeles, two delicate hands emerged from it. Using both index fingers and thumbs to form what looked like a heart, Beyoncé flashed the signal of appreciation back to the crowd of fans. She and her husband and daughter then disappeared into the chaos of the big city, their destination unknown but one that was sure to find them, once again, “alone together in a crowd.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As an indicator of just how far Beyoncé Knowles has come in her career in little more than fifteen years, consider this: In 1999, I interviewed the original members of Destiny’s Child—Beyoncé, Kelly Rowland, LaTavia Roberson, and LeToya Luckett—during a soundcheck break for the Lady of Soul Awards in Los Angeles. At the time, I was freelancing for a number of black entertainment publications. Considering that the girls had enjoyed a couple of hits by this time and that I had been riding the crest of a decent writing career, I thought I would have little trouble selling the article I wrote based on the interview. However, much to my surprise there were no takers; I couldn’t sell the story! There was no interest.

  About two years later, the American edition of my European bestselling biography of Madonna was published. While in New York on my press tour for the book, I appeared on a Fox News television program. “Who do you think is the heir apparent to Madonna?” I was asked. It didn�
�t take long for me to come up with an answer. “Beyoncé Knowles,” I said. The response? “Who?” asked the commentator. “I’ve never heard of her. And how do you say that name again?” I shared a smile with my publicist, Jonathan Hahn, who was standing in the wings. He knew how I (and a growing number of fans) felt about Beyoncé: She was a success just waiting to happen.

  I went on with my writing career, penning biographies about a wide range of subjects, from Elizabeth Taylor to Marilyn Monroe to the Kennedys to the Hiltons. Of course, Beyoncé Knowles went on with her career, too, and as a result of her record-breaking achievements, today there aren’t many people on the planet who don’t know how to pronounce her name.

  A couple of years ago, I was working on a book about a powerful political family dynasty when the idea to write about Beyoncé came to my mind. The family dynasty book wasn’t gelling for me. I won’t reveal the nature of it because, who knows?—I may still tackle it one day. When I told my publisher I wanted to ditch it for a biography about Beyoncé, I was worried about the response. I thought it was a good idea since there hadn’t been a full-fledged, authoritative book about her. However, never before in my career had I ever stopped work on a book to switch to another topic. My publisher, though, was completely supportive (as always), and we agreed to a dramatic change in direction. Since I had written a Diana Ross biography, Call Her Miss Ross (my first New York Times bestseller), the idea of a Beyoncé biography somehow seemed like the perfect marriage of author and subject. Of course, Beyoncé and Diana have little in common in terms of temperament and personality, but they do have the same work ethic, the same drive . . . the same kind of awe-inspiring talent.

  When I was given the green light, I couldn’t wait to jump into a life history that, as it happened, turned out to be full of surprising twists and turns. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed writing a book more than this one, a story full of strong, wonderful characters, with the lady herself at the center of such a memorable family drama. Of course, like all of my books, this one was a collaborative effort. Therefore, I would like to now acknowledge those who assisted me in this endeavor.

 

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