by Toni Braxton
I never had a fling with Wesley—but I did once have a short romance with Shemar Moore, the model and actor. He and I met when he appeared in my video for the song “How Many Ways,” which was on my first album. We shot the video on location in Miami. And he had just gotten his role on The Young and the Restless. It was never anything serious between us—to this day, we’re cool as friends. If he walked in the room right now, he’d be like, “Hey, T—what’s up?” Yet from the day I saw him on the set, I have to admit that I did think he was cute. “My agent called and asked me, ‘Do you want to be in a Janet Jackson video or a Toni Braxton video?’” he said jokingly when we met. “I go, ‘Janet Jackson.’ But then I heard that Janet had already picked another guy—so that’s how I ended up with you.” We both snickered—me less so than him. What a prick, I thought. In the following few months, we’d call each other and get together when we were in the same city.
In between hanging out with Shemar, straightening out drama with Wesley, and jetting around the world for performances, I did my share of shopping. And in fact, I rarely had to plunk down my own credit card: The celebrity life comes with clothes galore. From Gucci to Manolo Blahniks and beyond, I received so many (free!) dresses, shoes, and handbags, and for a fashionista like me, few upsides of the famous life could compare. My stylist could call up a designer and get a dress for me right off the runway! “I need that for Toni Braxton,” he’d say—and many times, I would get exactly what I wanted. If I requested a dress to wear for an awards show or an event, I usually had to return it. But that didn’t matter too much—because there were always more cute items coming in for the next appearance. PS: I could wear just about anything worn by Kate Moss because we both have a short torso and long legs . . . the only thing I’d have to change about one of her dresses was the hemline. Once when I performed for Princess Diana, I wore this blue Calvin Klein dress that Kate had just worn on the runway. Loved it!
Using the money from that big check, I decided it was time to do what most celebrities get done when they first get a few dollars: I spruced up my home. “You’ve gotta get your house decorated,” L.A. had told me. “You don’t want it to look like you went down to the store and picked out a living room set.” So I hired an incredible decorator, Tom Pharr. In the end, the entire house was so charming . . . very French. Tom even got it onto the cover of Southern Living magazine. After getting settled into my new home, I also helped my family financially—I bought cars for my mother and sisters. Once I’d made those purchases, I still had $300,000 in my account. I figured that was plenty for me to live on—mostly because I didn’t know what awaited me just around the corner.
MY SECOND ALBUM, Secrets, hit during the summer of 1996. The self-titled debut record had catapulted me center stage in the R&B world—but it was album number two that actually turned me into a crossover success. For my sophomore effort, the legendary hit maker Diane Warren offered me another song that I wasn’t feeling—I thought it sounded a bit too Disney. She also offered it to Céline Dion, who turned it down. But L.A. and Clive thought it was perfect for me. “Trust me,” L.A. said, “you should take it. I promise you it’ll be one of the biggest songs of your career.” That’s how I ended up with a little song you might’ve heard of called “Un-Break My Heart,” which spent fourteen weeks at number one on the adult contemporary chart. I guess Céline and I each ended up with the song we were supposed to have.
I’d always wanted to let out my inner sexpot—and on Secrets, I got my chance. In the video for “You’re Makin’ Me High,” I swiveled my hips while wearing a white, formfitting catsuit (Pebbles finally got her wish!). The higher the split, the better I liked the dress. The deeper the neckline, the more eager I was to show off some cleavage. Bille Woodruff, the video director for all the songs on my second album, encouraged me to be sexy. Not only did I want to finally put behind me all those years I spent as a Plain Jane preacher’s kid, I yearned to feel like the sensuous, desirous woman I was evolving into.
L.A. encouraged that. “You should keep that sexy thing going,” he told me. “It works.” He’s the one who suggested that I pose for that provocative Vibe cover—the one that appeared on newsstands in June 1997. “You need to do something risky,” he said. And risky it was: I appeared to be nearly nude on that cover. Since I had my new toys by then (I’d had my boobies done!), I was okay with exposing my body—and I wanted to feel sexy so badly. Plus, I loved and trusted the photographer, Daniela Federici—I’d worked with her before, and she always knew how to make me look tall and lean. The truth is that I was actually wearing underwear—but my panties were Photoshopped out. The first time I saw the cover, even I was a little remorseful—that was a lot of skin to show. But the move was all part of the label’s plan to create an image of me as a sex symbol. Part of singing is acting—and part of acting is creating a fantasy.
The worldwide success of “You’re Makin’ Me High” and “Un-Break My Heart” made Clive certain about one thing: I could have the same crossover appeal as Whitney Houston. So Clive, Kenny, and L.A. decided to send me out on tour with Kenny G, whose “Songbird” single had made him one of the country’s hottest adult contemporary artists. I’d already proven that I could perform live: After my first album, I’d attempted to wow crowds during a series of tour dates I did with Frankie Beverly and Maze; my sisters were my background singers at the time. “You’ve already crossed over,” L.A. told me. “Now we need to take it a step higher.” So I agreed to tour with Kenny G and open for him. Sixty percent of the profits would go to him (it was his tour . . . ) and the remaining 40 would come to me. A month after I made the choice to do the tour, I got a call from L.A.
“The black tour promoters are planning to boycott your tour,” he said. Tour promoters organize, publicize, and oversee live concert events on behalf of artists. Among other tasks, they book the venue, set the price for the event to ensure that it is profitable, and orchestrate all on-site labor. Tour promoters—also known as concert promoters—negotiate a contract with the artist (usually through the artist’s agent) whose tours they are managing. Unfortunately, like many other industries in America, there’s some segregation among tour promoters—for instance, black tour promoters tend to have relationships with black artists, and white tour promoters tend to get access to white artists.
“Kenny G already has his own white promoters,” L.A. explained. “So the black promoters are locked out of your concert tour. That’s why they’re angry with you.”
I had no idea how to handle the situation—which is why I began backpedaling. “Maybe I shouldn’t do the tour,” I told L.A. After all, I hadn’t yet signed a contract.
But Clive squashed my idea. “You have to do the tour,” he said. “This is how Whitney made the crossover. You’re too black to be white and too white to be black. That’s why it’s so important that you straddle the fence.”
Around that time, I performed at the Soul Train Music Awards, held at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Just as I was about to go out onstage, one of my managers pulled me aside.
“If anyone comes up to you and asks, ‘Are you Toni Braxton?’ do not answer,” she said.
I wrinkled my forehead. “Huh? What’s going on?”
“Just keep walking if anyone calls out your name,” she told me.
With my nerves a little rattled by her comment, I walked out and sang for the audience, then made my way back to the greenroom. On my way out of the building, I didn’t even stop to sign autographs or shake hands, fearing someone might be after me. In the limo, my tour manager finally explained herself. “Kenny G’s people are trying to serve you papers,” she said. The concert’s floor manager had passed that news along to my manager just before she’d cautioned me. “They’re going to sue you if you don’t do the tour.” I couldn’t be served if I didn’t confirm my identity—and that’s why my manager had asked me to shun anyone who came up to me.
I was as astonished as I was mortified. Though I’d mentioned that I
was reconsidering whether I’d do the tour because of the issues with the black promoters, I hadn’t actually bowed out. In fact, tickets were already being sold.
So I decided that I’d better do two things: accompany Kenny G on that tour, and work out some kind of deal with the disgruntled promoters. As for the latter, I called up a record producer who had relationships with a lot of the promoters, and asked him to negotiate a deal. He did—which is how some of the black promoters ended up on my tour.
Kenny G and I never talked about what happened—for all I know, he didn’t even realize his manager had tried to serve me with a suit. That’s the way things often go in the music biz. On November 6, 1996, I set out on a tour with Kenny to perform in forty-two cities across the United States; once the U.S. tour was over, I’d go on to Europe for a series of concerts alone.
But everything wasn’t settled. Kenny G’s people were still nervous about whether I’d follow through with the tour, so they set up an arrangement to hold half of my earnings in escrow. This meant that I only received 20 percent of my 40 percent of the profits until the end of the show. My record company’s execs didn’t want to loan me any money for the tour, mostly because they had a personal beef with one of my managers. So in order to cover the costs associated with all of those concerts—the band, the sets, the props, the lights, the hair and makeup, the wardrobe, the background singers and dancers, the tour buses, the fuel, a couple of drivers, and a full crew to transport that whole operation from one city to the next—I took out a business loan from Arista for a million dollars. That had to be repaid at a rate of between $25,000 and $35,000 a week while I was still on the road. Those payments came from ticket sale earnings, and I put anything extra back into the show. Bottom line: Every week, I was barely breaking even—but even still, I forged ahead and did the best that I could to manage everything.
ONE EVENING DURING a break from the tour, I sat and surfed through the hotel’s TV channels. I happened to stop on ESPN, which I never watch—but a handsome man on the screen caught my eye. “He’s really cute,” I said to my security guy. “I know him,” he responded. “That’s Curtis Martin—he plays for the New England Patriots.” My eyes were still glued to the screen. “Do you want to meet him?” he asked. “You know him like that?” “Well, a friend of mine knows him like that,” he explained. I smiled, nodded, and didn’t think too much more about it—until the day, a few weeks later, when my security guy told me he’d arranged to have Curtis come to see me perform on the weekend when the tour stopped in Boston.
After the show, at around 10 P.M., Curtis and I met in the living room area of my hotel suite—I hadn’t had time to see him backstage, so my team arranged for us to sit down together back at the hotel (I felt perfectly safe because my security guy, who’d assured me that Curtis was a gentleman, would be standing by right across the hall). Before Curtis arrived, I changed out of my stage dress and into an oversized log-cabin-style plaid sweatshirt and some jeans. My face was still done up. “Wow,” he joked when I greeted him, “I thought you were going to answer the door wearing a sequined gown.” “Why would I do that?” I said, laughing a little. “I had to get comfortable.” I welcomed him in and we sat across from each other on the couch.
I immediately felt at ease with Curtis—talking with him seemed effortless. We covered a whole range of subjects: religion (he had just become a Christian and was very excited about his new faith), sports (his passion for football), and music. We ordered room service, and between bites of my burger and fries and his steak, our hour of conversation somehow turned into several. By 4 A.M., I already knew I liked him—a lot.
That conversation quickly progressed into a relationship. We began calling and texting each other many times a day. We’d sometimes talk so late into the evening that one of us would fall asleep on the phone. He came to more of my performances—like when he traveled to meet me in Pittsburgh (his hometown) when the tour stopped there. I even carved out time to go to one of his games. Our romance was a whirlwind—and I enjoyed every moment of the ride. I still call Curtis my first real love. And though I eventually discovered that he is six years younger than me (he once couldn’t rent a car because he wasn’t yet twenty-five!), our age difference didn’t matter at all. What did matter was the instantaneous connection and real friendship that we built with one another.
We spent a lot of our time talking about religion—he had the kind of zeal that comes with being a baby Christian. “I love the way you were raised,” he’d say when I’d tell him about all the time we spent in church. He also loved the fact that I was so green—I’d been exposed to so little about the world and pop culture during my childhood, which is why I often found myself pretending that I knew things that I had absolutely no clue about. “Stop pretending,” Curtis would tell me. “It’s okay to be green.” Before he got into pro football, Curtis had an upbringing that I would call very street—and the discipline that came with playing football went along with the discipline he was developing in his newfound Christianity.
One evening a few weeks into our relationship, Curtis brought up the topic of sex. “How do you feel about waiting?” We’d been kissing and hugging a lot up to that point, but I’d decided that I didn’t want to rush intimacy—and I told him that. “For me, sex is for when you get married,” he said. “I can’t wait to make love to my wife one day.” Because of his religious beliefs, he’d chosen to become celibate. I agreed. This man must really like me if he’s telling me this, I thought. I actually already knew he liked me—but his statement about wanting to wait for marriage made me feel like he respected me. I also admired him for standing by his convictions—something not that many people do anymore. So that night, we agreed that we’d wait—and we did. I knew what the Bible said about sex, so deep down, I realized we should refrain. And besides that, I figured it was worth waiting to have intimacy if our love story would one day end with a happily ever after.
I loved how fervent Curtis was about his faith—but I have to confess that, at times, it was a little off-putting. He was coming fresh to Christianity after a childhood with no religious faith—whereas my childhood experience with Christianity was one filled with fear and condemnation. “You have to unlearn some of the things you were taught,” Curtis would tell me. He was at the juncture where you think you know everything—and the tendency is to Bible thump and quote a lot of Scripture. But because I knew he was such a young Christian—and because I appreciated the intensity that he had about his faith—I often just set aside my slight annoyance.
In-between all those long conversations (and when I could break away from my tour for a day), Curtis and I actually had a lot of fun together. He once took me to see The Blue Man Group in Boston. He also took me out to a lot of nice restaurants. When others would spot us together, I did my best to steer the limelight toward him—back then, he wasn’t as much of a star football player as he has become in the years since, and I didn’t want my career as a singer to overshadow his accomplishments. In our quiet moments away from the public, Curtis was quite romantic: He wrote me poems and read me passages from Song of Solomon in the Bible. By the time I wrapped up the U.S. part of my tour and prepared to fly off to Europe, I knew one thing for certain: I wanted to spend the rest of my life with Curtis.
WHILE I WAS on tour in Europe, it quickly became apparent that I couldn’t keep up with all the payments I owed Arista. Even once I counted the money I had in escrow, I was still falling into a financial hole. The tour was just too costly. “We’ve gotta cut back on the scenery for the sets,” one of my managers told me. He didn’t show me any numbers, but I could tell by the look on his face that we were in trouble. “This whole tour is costing too much,” he said. So I scaled it all back by several thousand per show.
I also did everything I could to cut my personal costs. I sold my home in Atlanta and instead bought a condo in Los Angeles—since we were doing most of our studio recording in L.A. by that time, purchasing a place there meant drastically r
educing hotel and travel expenses. And I invested a lot of my own money into keeping the show going. When my sisters joined me as backup singers on the European leg of the tour, I paid them out of my own pocket—so I could reduce the deficit for the tour. I also paid for Mint Condition (my favorite band!) to perform with me during the tour. With all those expenses, my checking account funds began dwindling from a strong six figures to a weak five.
As if my stress level wasn’t already off the charts, another problem cropped up during this time. I began to suspect that my father was having an affair. He’d often ask me to get free tickets for some of the people at his job at Baltimore Gas and Electric Company (he’d left E. J. Korvette once it closed down back in 1980). I happily arranged tickets for his colleagues. One time, he got tickets for his coworker to attend a concert. Mommy went to the concert as well, but her seat was all the way on the other side of the arena. After the show, a woman who was one of my assistants at the time told me, “Toni, your father’s got a girlfriend! I saw him kissing on some lady”—but I wasn’t quite sure whether to believe her. Another time when my sisters were on a tour with Luther Vandross, Daddy flew out to meet them in Vegas. He brought one of his coworkers with him—you guessed it, this same woman—and her mother. They all stayed in a large suite. And in Severn, this woman would often call my parents’ house and say, “Is Reverend Braxton there?” Sometimes, my father would suddenly have to go after one of those calls. Once when I was home visiting, Daddy even went out in the middle of a snowstorm after this woman rang; he claimed he had to “work” and that he needed to stay overnight. To this day, Mommy says that she never saw the signs—but they were abundantly clear to me.