I’m at an age and stage in my career where I get asked, “Is there a part you’d still like to play?”
I’ve got an answer.
A monster.
That usually gets a raised eyebrow.
I’m not talking about a female villain or a monster bitch mother-in-law type. It’s not a metaphor, you know. I want to play an actual monster.
Horror movies are in my DNA. I like ’em. They make me happy. No slasher films. I don’t want to be scared by anything like reality. Give me a good ol’ Dracula movie or some giant Japanese reptile terror.
When I was a kid, we had Chiller Theatre on our TV every Saturday night. WPIX, Channel 11 in New York. The host was John Zacherle, this guy with a sunken-in face and weird eyes, dressed all in black. He was fantastic and the scariest man I’d ever seen. He would introduce the movie of the night and then come back on at the commercial breaks. The breaks were done live, so you never knew what was going to happen with him.
My mom, Clyde, and I would make up our Jiffy Pop popcorn before the opening credits of the show, which showed this gray and dead-looking hand coming up through the dry desert ground.
Godzilla, The Crawling Eye, Mothra, The Wolf Man, and things like giant leeches falling from New York skyscrapers completely captured me. I didn’t even know these movies were called horror. I thought they were good entertainment that happened to be scary.
The famous Hammer horror movies also rolled out when I was young: Dracula: Prince of Darkness, The Plague of the Zombies, Kiss of the Vampire, The Gorgon, all the really good ones. We’d go see them first at the RKO theater on the corner of Twenty-Third Street and Eighth Avenue; then a few years later, they’d show up on TV. I still scour the TV listings every week to see if any of them are playing.
Yeah, the plotlines can be ridiculous. But they’d still get you jumping. You get that all-over feeling of knowing you’re going to be surprised or shocked. Like in Trilogy of Terror: Karen Black gets attacked by a wooden doll that is about fourteen inches tall. It’s a tribal Zuni hunter doll that comes to life and attacks her legs with a knife as she walks through her living room. Then it hacks its way through her locked bedroom door to get to her, making croaky animal sounds. At some point, it seems ridiculous that she is locked in her own apartment and can’t seem to open a window and toss the doll out, but that’s how it is and you just have to go with it. Seems like an ugly doll with pointy teeth coming to life couldn’t scare the shit out of you, but it does.
Same with seeing Jaws in the movie theater when I was a teenager. At first, I remember thinking, Oh, my God, I’m seeing a movie about a shark? Then, there was the music, like a heart thumping, and you see the girl’s legs kicking underwater, and you know there’s a big-ass shark scoping her out. You can’t catch your breath. Your hair feels like it’s lifting off your head. You want to yell, but you can’t. That’s some good shit. In fact, I bet I’m not the only one who won’t get in the ocean over my knees anymore.
Then there were the Hercules movies with bodybuilder Steve Reeves as the main character. You know, when you can wrap chains around Roman columns and pull down the whole building with your muscles, well . . . that’s some impressive shit. I liked that he could stop injustice with those impressive biceps.
Besides Chiller Theatre and TV sitcoms and variety shows, Million Dollar Movie was broadcast on WOR-TV Channel 9. The same movie would play all day long on Saturday starting at 9:00 a.m. Since my mom, Clyde, and I were all movie buffs, we loved it. I’d watch the same movie three times in a row if I could get away with it.
They would run the full spectrum of different kinds of movies, from King Kong to Yankee Doodle Dandy. I would sit there and absorb everything, the way it all worked. I’d see Greta Garbo, Charles Boyer, or Katharine Hepburn acting in one movie, and then they’d play someone completely different, maybe with a different accent, in another movie.
I knew about great TV shows like I Love Lucy and The Danny Kaye Show. I knew early on that acting was what I wanted to do. Then it seemed like a great thing to do. It was magic.
When I was growing up, I also got to discover what it means to be a performer playing yourself by watching the great comedians do their thing. I was absorbing it all from the pros: Moms Mabley, Totie Fields, Alan King, and Don Rickles. They made me laugh really hard.
I don’t know if anyone ever asked my mother what she wanted to do when she was a kid. It was probably not something folks asked kids in that generation. There were fewer options. I think my mom decided for herself that if she had children, she would do it differently; whatever they were into, she would make sure conversations would happen where she could find out more. She felt that children should be heard all the time and their wishes adhered to at least some of the time.
Because my mom was open to it and encouraged it, I started going on stage around age eight at the Hudson Guild Theatre in Chelsea. The shows were performed in the auditorium of the nearby community service center, so I could get myself there and back home. It’s about all I really loved doing. They had both children’s theater productions and adult productions with children performing. I liked the idea that I could be anybody from anywhere at any time period. I adored that. And I love telling stories.
After doing a few plays with the Hudson Guild, I auditioned for other things. As a young teenager, I auditioned for a part in a play directed by Vinnette Carroll, who was the first black woman to direct a play on Broadway. She was also a playwright and the artistic director of the Urban Arts Corps, which she started up in the ’60s.
After I auditioned, she cast me. I found out I had the role on a Monday. Then, Vinnette called my house on Tuesday.
“I’m so sorry, darling,” she said. “I’ve changed my mind. I feel I have to do it this way.”
I suddenly no longer had the part.
When my mother came home from work, I had to explain to her about Vinnette’s call.
She said, “What? What happened?”
I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t know what had happened, and I guess I was too crushed to ask.
I was surprised Ma was upset, but she was. She took herself over to Vinnette Carroll’s theater space and had some type of conversation.
Nothing changed. I still didn’t have the part. Someone Vinnette had hoped to put in the role finally showed up to audition after she had given me the part.
My mother sat with me at the kitchen table.
“There will be something else for you. You weren’t expecting this, but there will be other things. You just have to keep at it.”
I got to learn this knockdown lesson years before I started a film career, so it was good in the long run. Because if you’re going to be an actor, at some point this kind of thing happens to you. And most of the time, nobody tells you why. You just have to keep going.
As I headed into high school, it became clear that I couldn’t learn in the ways being taught.
At first, Ma would give me a look like, Come on, you can do this.
But then she accepted that it wasn’t that I didn’t want to do it; I couldn’t.
When I was finishing up tenth grade, I told her I didn’t want to go back. I knew this wouldn’t be what she wanted to hear because she was a teacher, but she listened to me.
“If you think this is what you need to do. I don’t like it,” she told me, “but I know you probably wouldn’t be doing it if you could figure out a way to get through.”
It was harder every day. She knew I was serious about it because I was telling her upfront.
“Okay,” she said. “You’re not sneaking around, not going to school. You’re telling me now. So, if you leave high school, we’ll have to make a deal.”
Education and learning were too important to my mom for her to be concerned about what I would be doing if I wasn’t in school. I knew she would have to make it better for her, somehow.
She then told me, “We’ll look and find things that might be of interest to you. But you have to spend some time at a lecture or an exhibit, and you have to spend time learning every week.”
So this was what we would do. On Sunday, she and I would sit down with the local newspapers, and she would look up what was going on in New York. I’d have a pen and paper, and she’d read out options to me of things I might like to do.
“Okay, there’s a lecture on civil rights at the library on Tuesday. And the museum of modern history has an exhibit and lecture on Thursday morning you could go to.”
I’d pick out five or ten free lectures or exhibits each week and promise her that I would attend to supplement my education. That was our deal, and I stuck to it for a couple of years.
During those years, once my school uniform days were over, I found a way to look like myself. The hippies had come to Chelsea, and wearing a bra was never something I was interested in doing anyway. I would get painter pants and overalls from the surplus stores and wear long underwear shirts and multicolored tams over my natural hair. Ma was cool with whatever I wanted to wear, but I think getting used to natural hair took her a while.
A lot of the younger folks in the neighborhood, both women and men, suddenly started wearing Afros. Nobody really talked about it. It just started to happen. But it took a while. Before, people in my mother’s generation were raised to believe that they needed to look more like white people because somehow our natural hair was not attractive. You know, they’d have to explain to people about their hair. As I mentioned earlier, when my mom was working at the hospital, she straightened her hair every day. She put an iron comb in the open flame on the stove, and she would put that comb in her hair with a little Royal Crown hair grease and make it straight. That’s just the way it was. But slowly, things started to shift.
There were “Black Is Beautiful” posters all over New York in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and James Brown was singing about being proud to be black. I think that it was never a concern in our house whether we were beautiful or not. We just were. We didn’t have those kinds of discussions.
One day, I came out of the bathroom wearing my hair in a short Afro.
My mother looked at me. “Where are you going?”
I said I was going downstairs.
“So, are we having that discussion now about your hair? Are you making a statement with this look?”
Now truth be told, I just wanted to try it. I mean, lots of people had started to wear it, and I thought it looked nice. I hadn’t asked her anything about my new look. I was just doing it. And she wanted to have a discussion about it.
But when I stopped to listen to what she had to say, she dropped it. “Never mind. You have every right to go out and be seen the way you want to be seen. So, if you’re comfortable with what’s on your head, I’m not gonna say anything more.”
About a year later, she was wearing her hair in a short Afro and happy as hell not to have to use a hot comb anymore.
For the most part, she thought I should wear whatever made me feel like myself.
I once saw a movie with Peter Sellers that came out when I was young called The World of Henry Orient. He plays a famous, quirky New York pianist who is stalked by two teenage girls who have a crush on him. One of the teen girls wears an open fur coat wherever she goes. I dug the look and found one for myself at a thrift store. I think it was sixteen bucks, so I had to put it on hold. As odd as a fur coat would look over painter pants, Ma walked me over to the store and paid for the rest.
About fifteen years later, when I had finished filming The Color Purple, I wanted to give my mom something she had always wanted. I finally had some money to make it happen for her.
One day I said to her, “What have you always wanted that you never ever thought that you would get?”
She said, “Really? Why are you asking me this?”
I said, “Ma, I want to know! What did you always know that you had to have one day?”
She had an answer: “Well, I always wanted a beaver bowler.”
I said, “Uh, what’s that?”
She repeated it, as if I hadn’t heard her. “A beaver bowler.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
My mother gave me a look and continued, “You know what a bowler hat is, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, this is a bowler made out of beaver pelt. And it comes in a hat box with a brush to keep it in good shape.”
You’ve got to remember that this was the early ’80s, years before PETA was campaigning to end fur as fashion. Beaver bowlers weren’t a big fashion item in the US, so I had one shipped in from Europe for my mom. She wore that hat all the time.
The other thing she told me she really wanted was an ermine coat. Ermine is one of the most luxurious furs. I was happy to get it for her, but I never saw her wear it out of the house, even in the early ’80s.
One day I was walking past her bedroom, and I saw the coat laid out on the end of her bed.
“Ma, what are you going to do with the ermine coat? Why don’t you wear it?”
She said, “I didn’t want it to wear it.”
“Okay,” I said. “So, what are you going to do with it?”
That’s when she showed me. She told me to go downstairs into the entryway of my LA house. I did.
Then she came to the top of the stairs with her fur coat in one hand, hanging down to the floor. She put her other hand on the railing and slowly walked down the stairs, dragging the fur coat, step by step, behind her.
I busted out laughing. We had probably watched a hundred films from the 1930s on Million Dollar Movie where the star—Greta Garbo, Carole Lombard, Marlene Dietrich, or Bette Davis—would slowly descend a staircase, her fur coat sweeping the steps behind her.
When the early ’90s rolled around and people were throwing paint on women wearing fur coats, my mother was pissed.
She said, “These poor women had one chance to own a fur coat. And here comes somebody throwing paint on it.”
She knew herself well. She said she was never going to give anybody an opportunity to toss paint on her prized coat. She said if it happened, there would for sure be a fight.
So instead she used it as a throw on her bed, and every once in a while, she’d gracefully drag it down the stairs to the first floor. My mother may not have been an actress, but she sure knew how to work it!