Friends: A Love Story (8 page)

Doing scenes with Charles was amazing. I have always enjoyed working with somebody who is very, very good at what they do: I am drawn to them, attracted to them, appreciate them. He and I could relate as actors. On top of that he could be very sweet. He would just talk and laugh—he has tremendous charisma. He can get you on board and excited about anything. I remember wishing I could engage people to the degree he could. He could be talking about a jelly jar and people would look at him like he was talking about a vase from
the Ming dynasty. He would weave spells and have people enraptured. Maybe it was witchcraft on a level. I remember watching him, knowing what he was talking about and wanting to say, “It ain't all that—it's a jelly jar. He's got you caught up! Talkin' 'bout a Mason jar….” Observing him was when I really understood the meaning of the term “confidence man”—he had a tremendous amount of assuredness when he talked about his ideas. He could make you go along with him. I remember thinking it was a gift and wishing I had it. (Then again, since what he was talking about wasn't always quite true, it might have been a little like lying.)

Men seemed to respect Charles, whether students or male teachers. He didn't take no mess off of no one. Somewhere along the way, he had earned the nickname Roc. Charles would cuss people out one day and be, “talk to the hand” without saying it. The other students would ask me, “What's wrong with Charles? Is he okay? Is he all right?” I'd say, “Yeah, he's fine. Ain't nothin' wrong with him.” But everyone would be concerned about how he felt, was he upset? The next day Charles would smile easy, light up the world and draw people back in. “Hey man!” It was amazing to watch him. I could never dissect how he did it.

I don't exactly remember when my admiration for Charles turned into romantic attraction. He was talented, charismatic and sweet; he was intimidating; he was a protector; he trained as a boxer and was physically fit. I don't like bad boys, but I do like a man with a little spice. I'm not one for bland food; overall, I like interesting people—interesting and attractive, naturally attractive.

One night he came home to our apartment while I was on the couch taking a nap.

“Hey, girl, why don't you get on up and go to bed?”

“Whaaat?”

I starting working my feminine wiles. It wasn't too hard. You
know, you act cold, he warms you up, you fall into his arms. Next thing you know, you're kissing and it's on. Now you're a couple. Now you're together. Now you need another roommate.

My relationship with Charles had its ups and downs. In private, he was very, very sweet—baby talk, that kind of thing. He would call his mother every week. When I would complain about the phone bill, he'd say, “When I was in prison, I couldn't call.” What could I say to that? He also loved animals—puppies, birds, fish, parakeets. One of our classmates bought a little white pit bull, Radar. Roc loved that dog; she had a built-in dog walker. He would get the dog and go jogging, groom him, walk around with him. Animals seemed to relax him. Maybe with animals you ain't gotta talk and explain yourself like you do when human beings are upset with you. It was truly a case of man's best friend. Today I hear he has a farm—goats and a lion—somewhere back home in Maryland. So he had this interesting duality about him—bad boy, don't take no mess, real dangerous; yet very gentle by and large.

Of course, in addition to his plus side, there were certain things about Charles I didn't much care for—“What? You're betting on pit-bull fights!” I didn't know about all that. And he had a Don Juan complex. There was another little girl in the class below us who found him attractive, as well. I remember fussin' with him about the time and smiles and positive energy he gave her—and whatever else might have been going on. They were awfully friendly over in corners whispering and talking. I don't know if he was trying to make me jealous but I was. And, on top of that, she was white. I couldn't stand it, I couldn't stand
her!
I turned into a green-eyed-monster girl—I was jealous as hell. Of course, he assured me they were just friends—friendly friends. But in my mind it was more than friendly talk. Everyone knew we were definitely roommates, living together, going together or whatever. Yet my intuition—my woman's intuition, my actor's intuition—said something
wasn't right. “If she was just friendly, then I would sense that. But I sense more,” I would tell him. One time we were giving a party at our apartment. The phone rang and Charles and I picked up at the same time.

“What you doing?” the woman asked.

“Oh, Angela's having a party,” Charles answered.

“Well, how long is it gonna last?”

“Oh, I don't know.”

“Will you come over?”

“What are you doing?”

“Oh, I'm about to take a bath.”

When they hung up I called him on it. In private. I ain't crazy like that: I ain't gonna fight in public.

“Oh,
I'm
the one who's having the party. Now it's
my
party!”

“Angela, you always imagining things. I knew you were on the phone. That's why I said what I said.”

My head was tight and about to explode. I had my great-granddad in mind as my frame of reference for what a good man was like. I loved Charles but didn't think he was as cool as Granddad. I knew our relationship would end one day.

I know there were things Charles wished were different about me, too. On top of complaining about my jealousy and insecurity, he would tell me that I tried to be “perfect”: I prayed; I went to church; I sang in the choir; I put my money in the Bible. The Bible was by the bed and the money was in the Bible. I figured that was the safest place for it—safer than putting it in your sock drawer, your underwear drawer or under your mattress. My thought was, “Lord, it's in your hands. Lord, multiply it!”

Eventually my nemesis classmate and I were cast in a play together—the one where I'm the black mom and she's the white daughter. When we had to work with each other, see each other, be up on each other, sense each other and see each other for who we were, we were cool. We liked each other. We talked once in the library.

“I was mad at you,” I told her.

“I was upset that you were mad at me.”

“Well, I was mad because I thought you and he were up to something. Maybe I was afraid of you.”

Something might have been going on between her and Charles, or he may have been trying to make it seem like something was going on when nothing was happening. Whatever. The way I thought about it, none of it was forever—it wasn't like either of us was going to be with Charles permanently. Yet we had become two women at odds and had gotten all pulled out of shape over this thing. When we finally talked, we realized, “Oh, you're feeling like that?” That's when I asked myself, Is it worth it? I realized she was cool and that we were more alike than not alike. I reflected on how I had gotten to this place where I was in graduate school trying to learn and grow, yet during part of my day I was just agitated whenever I saw her. I had enough to worry about just trying to get through school, yet I had allowed this one person to
a-gi-tate, ir-ri-tate
the
hell
out of me. Because of this guy. Over this man. After we talked I got past all of the bullshit that was making me insecure and maybe her insecure, too. From that point on we had a mutual-admiration society. We made peace, embraced each other, healed, grew to like each other and worked together well. I appreciated her as an actress. After that experience I realized that women are just wonderful, and it's not worth having a man in the middle.

While all this was happening, my classmates and I were preparing for the “League” auditions at Julliard in New York. All the drama schools—back then, it was Yale, Carnegie Mellon, Julliard, NYU, ACT, there are more now—would present their graduating class and invite casting directors and agents to see them. During our last year, we worked with a couple of partners on our scenes. I recall I had three—one with Charles, one with Sabrina and another with Elly Koslo. I think we performed versatile Shakespeare contemporary avant-garde. The setup for
the Leagues was real simple: you'd go from scene to scene to scene. In total, there might be an hour of Yale's Class of '83 presenting itself. After you performed you could walk down the hall and look at a preliminary list of agencies who were interested in setting up an appointment to meet you; maybe they have a project they're working on and want you to audition. But the real goal was to get an agent. Back then, actors were moving to New York to do theater—very few people were moving to L.A. That's what actors did after drama school. There wasn't a lot of television filmed in New York, except for
The Cosby Show,
soap operas and industrial films. So the goal was to find an apartment, an agent and go on auditions. The Leagues helped you make the transition.

After the Leagues were over, we went back to school and waited for a more detailed list of students the agents were interested in interviewing. Some might want to meet you right away; others might want to see you a little later. I think I had about three or four people interested in seeing me. That wasn't a lot, but some classmates didn't receive any requests. One girl in our class—Sabrina Le Beauf—just blossomed. She became the star of our class, the star of the Leagues with around seventeen requests. (Later, she played Sondra Huxtable on
The Cosby Show.
) So I took the train back down to New York to meet these agents, from the big muckety-muck agencies to the smaller boutiques. I went to Associated Artists, a small agency, last. I remember one of the agents, Louis Ambrosio, remarking, “Oh, we didn't think you were coming. We almost forgot about you.”

“Well, good thing you didn't do that,” I replied. I was young, I was cocky, I was graduating from Yale. We talked and I guess they liked me. I ended up signing with the agency, which later became Ambrosio Mortimer.

 

Everyone—my mother, my auntie and uncle—came up to my drama school graduation. It was an exciting day, full of pos
sibilities. I have a picture of myself somewhere, looking very young, idealistic and fresh-faced. I was also happy because I had received a scholarship to cover my grad school expenses. So I only had undergraduate school loans to contend with, which was a grand total of about four thousand dollars. Of course, that seemed like a lot at the time. (When I had signed for the thousand-dollar loans each fall, I thought, “Gosh, how am I ever going to pay this back?”) Now I told myself, It needs to be whatever it needs to be and I'm easily going to be able to pay it back. I even took out a little extra loan because I knew I was moving to New York and wanted to have enough to cover rent. And I had some graduation money my family gave me.

Charles and I had decided to move to New York together. We had found a little rent-controlled apartment an older alumna was subletting. I remember Charles told his mom, “Look where Angela keeps the money.” I felt like I had to think about that for both of us.

 

Late that spring of my third year, Charles, John Turturro and I took a prospective student to a pub to talk to him about “the Yale experience”. The brother's name was Courtney B. Vance.

M
y first semester at Harvard was tough. Seeing my parents walk down the stairs was really hard. I can't imagine what that is like as a parent—are you bereft or ecstatic, or a combination of both? All I know is that I really, really, really missed Mom and Dad that fall of 1978. I had a hard time adjusting to college and all the academic pressure. “What grade did you get? What's your major? What are you going to do?” Plus, I wasn't raised to be a party boy, drinking beer and hanging out, which it seemed everyone was doing. At least in October I got to go to Swarthmore to visit Kristin. But when I was there she started talking about how maybe we should break up. When I got back to school, a “Dear Courtney” letter was already waiting for me. But needless to say I was blue. I threw myself into my classes and my work-study job.

Because I had done so much stuff in high school, I was exhausted and had had enough of extracurricular activities. I decided I would just run track and focus on figuring out what I wanted to do for my career. Figuring out what to do was important to me. My dad didn't seem to enjoy what he did for a living. After watching him struggle, I knew I wanted to find something that I was happy doing.

My plan was to meet as many new kids as I could so I could find out what their parents did. I knew that not knowing what we wanted to do, we would talk to each other and figure it out. But when I got there, I learned that everyone but me already knew what they wanted to do.

“I'm gonna make the money, brotha.”

“How do you know? You're only eighteen,” I'd ask.

“What do you mean—how do I know?”

“Where did you find that out?”

I was shocked. I felt like I was behind the eight ball, so I went to the Office of Career Services and Off-Campus Learning. You could supposedly go there and tap into alumni for career advice in certain fields. I'd try to contact the alumni but all their phone numbers were no good.

“I feel like such a loser,” I told the career counselor.

“What are you talking about? You're a freshman!” she said. “What are you doing in here?”

“I feel like I'm behind everyone else.”

“There's nothing wrong with you,” the counselor laughed. “Now, get out of my office!”

That fall I started training with the track team. Because of that, I was with the same group of guys all the time. I liked them, but I felt like I did that in high school—hang out with the same kids all the time. “This is not working. This isn't part of my plan.” I felt like I needed to be with a new group of people if I was going to meet kids and find out what their parents did. That's when it hit me—that was the end of competitive athletics for me. I felt like maybe I could meet more kids if I auditioned for plays.

I hadn't done much acting before. Right before I graduated from Country Day, I had played the tiny role of Mr. Witherspoon in
Arsenic and Old Lace.
It was a lot of fun and I promised my teacher I'd try acting again. But at Harvard acting was a big deal. Every department, every house had a different dramatic
society. If you wanted to act, you could go from show to show to show. There were hundreds of plays and musicals going on at one time—large, medium and small. Multiply that by all the different colleges in Boston and there were thousands of plays going on in Boston at any given time. I figured I'd try out for some of them. It wasn't about the acting; I wanted to meet new people so I could figure out what I wanted to do.

The first audition I went to was for a play called
Mars.
We had to pretend to be things like steam, mist, fire and darkness. While I was waiting to be called, a beautiful girl caught my eye. Whoa! I thought. Inspired by her beauty, I threw myself into my roles: steam, mist, fire, darkness! I got a part. And that girl, whom, to allow her some privacy I'll call Ahren Moore, ended up being my girlfriend for the next eleven years. Ahren was an actress and dancer and very graceful—tall, statuesque, gorgeous. She was a sweet girl. I really liked that she was honest, simple and positive. In her world, the glass was always half-f. Ahren was the picture of beauty, inside and out. Her character and beauty were exactly what I had been raised to look for. And she was just the right girlfriend for a young man who had walked out of his family's house an innocent, who didn't know about the birds and the bees.

After my freshman year I returned home to Detroit. Jobs were hard to find that summer. I was blue. I knew my parents needed me to earn money to help out. Something finally broke in July. My dad knew someone at GM who got me a job filing papers. I started thinking that I might want to work there one day, so I became “Henry the Explorer” all over again.

I'm going to read about the different offices at the world headquarters, I thought. Then I'm going to go to every office and tell them, “I'm going to be a sophomore at Harvard. I just want to know what you do.”

All of GM opened their doors to me. I'd call the VP of Legal or Purchasing and say, “I don't want to take up your time, sir,
but I'm a sophomore at Harvard and may potentially work here. Do you mind talking to me about what you do?”

I met so many people that summer. The guys I was working with would ask me, “What are you doing on your lunch break?”

“I'm going to a meeting,” I'd say. Then I'd leave my paper-filing job to meet with the VP of Worldwide Purchasing. When I left to return to school, everybody loved me and wanted me to come back to GM.

 

During the first semester of my sophomore year, I got bitten by the acting bug. I had a hard time telling Ahren that I wanted to be an actor. She was a serious actress. I was reluctant to tell her. I thought she wouldn't respect me or wouldn't think I was serious enough. I didn't want her to think that I thought that I could just come in and do what I'd call “this acting thing.” I thought she'd say, “You can't become an actor, Court. This is my thing. This is what
I
do.” When I finally told her, she was glad and told me she thought I was good. It was a big relief.

When I went home that Christmas I still didn't know what I wanted to do for a living, but at least I felt like I had a plan. I told my parents, “I want to take a year off and act.” I wanted to go to Banff, a famous drama and arts center nestled in the Canadian Rockies. I had the brochure all ready and everything.

My parents just looked at each other. Cecilie was caught up in the Vietnam protest movement and struggling to stay at Michigan State and now here I was, wanting to drop out and act. They had taught me that I could be anything I wanted, but I'm sure in their minds they were thinking, “Oh, God, no! Not that!” My folks didn't know anything about acting except that most actors were unemployed, especially black ones. But they couldn't go back on what they had taught me now.

“Son, we don't mean to diminish what you want to do,” my dad said. “But you can't take a year off. If you do, it will extend our payments. Stay in school, finish up and then you can do that.”

“But I really want to act,” I pleaded to my mother. “I don't know what I want to do for my career.”

“What happened to all your confidence?” she asked.

“It's just so hard. Everyone seems to know what they want to do.”

“You're going to figure it out, son,” she told me. “It's going to be all right.”

I was really disappointed, but what they forced me to do was come up with plan B. I realized I was at Harvard to expand my mind and learn, so I would do that. But people had been telling me about this thing called drama school and it sounded like something I wanted to do. “I'll expand my mind and do shows while I'm here, then I'll go to drama school when I finish.” To be able to do shows, I felt like I needed to major in something that didn't require writing a thesis. I just wanted to take a blue-book exam. For some reason, history didn't require a thesis so that's what I chose. Then I took courses in everything historical I thought would expand my mind.

I finally knew what I wanted to do! For the next two and a half years I threw myself into acting. I started with shows at Harvard, but college drama departments are real cliquey. If you acted in the major plays, you were with the same people in every show; the same people got all the major roles. I decided to get off campus. I started doing all kinds of stuff—hand modeling, working with commercial agents and going to major theatrical organizations like the Boston Shakespeare Company and Theater-Works. From doing that, I started to meet a whole different circle of folks. I did an acting workshop in Boston, and our final showing was in front of the artistic director of the Boston Shakespeare Company. He invited me to become an apprentice with the company, and by my junior year I was a company member doing major roles in major plays like
Hamlet
and
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
I was a company member getting a small salary. I was a little acting machine. I
finally knew what I wanted to do! So much for GM—I had a plan and I was working it!

Of course, the folks at Harvard didn't know about any of these things. People never saw me at Harvard. I had disappeared. I would spend the night with Ahren or with my aunt in town, get up at 5:00 a.m. and ride my bike across the Charles River—rain, sleet, snow or shine—in time to do my work-study job, which was delivering
New York Times, Boston Globe
and
Harvard Crimson
newspapers to the students in Harvard Yard. I didn't know the bus or the subway schedule; I was always on my bike. It was only by the grace of God that I didn't fall under some bus wheels during a blizzard. I would deliver the papers to the kids living in Harvard Yard because it didn't conflict with anything else. But I had to get there by 5:30 a.m.; if I got there late, the students would take my papers. And guess whose paycheck that had to come out of? From there I'd go to classes in the morning and rehearsals in the afternoon. I'd do shows and see Ahren at night. I got very little sleep but I was extremely excited and happy.

The summer of my sophomore year I returned to Detroit and worked at GM. On Sundays I was drawn to church. I went on my own. One time I was so moved by the service I walked down the aisle, ready to give my life to the Lord. But something held me back. “No, I'm not ready.” I turned around and walked out of the sanctuary. I would answer the Lord's call at a later time.

 

During the summers of my junior and senior year Ahren and I auditioned and were accepted as members of Shakespeare & Company, a theater and festival in Lenox, Massachusetts. About fifteen students lived communally in stables that had been converted to apartments on The Mount, the estate of Edith Wharton, a twentieth-century American writer. In exchange for doing things like dusting the house, mowing the lawn, pulling stumps and laying down gravel, we got free acting classes. It was a wonderful exchange.

Shakespeare & Company's approach presented a complete mind shift for me. Up to that point I thought acting was all about using different voices. I was good at that. Actually, I was becoming kind of arrogant about it. I thought we'd be learning about the intricacies of the text and iambic pentameter, the rhythm Shakespeare used for much of his work, which I thought was the next level. We didn't do any of that. Instead, we were called on to use our emotions. I didn't know anything about emotions—how to tap into them or use them. In fact, I had spent much of my youth hiding my feelings so I wouldn't get teased. Once I learned that we had to explore them, I copped an attitude. “Why you gotta explore your emotions? What's up with that?” I didn't realize that sharing your emotions is what acting is all about. All I knew was that I was being asked to stand in front of a group of people I didn't know and share personal things about myself. In one particular exercise, they wanted us to share two things about ourselves we wanted them to know and two things about ourselves that we didn't want them to know. Where I came from, revealing any vulnerability—not to mention deep secrets—could subject you to relentless humiliation. But here, they didn't want you to hold back; you had to reveal things. As my classmates shared, all kinds of things came up. Tears would suddenly start flowing because people were talking about things they'd never told anyone before. I thought, “You mean I've got to cry?” I said to myself, “Oh, Lord, that's too much. I don't know if I want to know that.” This kind of intimacy was extremely foreign to me.

My first summer at Shakespeare & Company I was out of my depth. “What does this have to do with acting? How does it apply to playing Shakespeare? Why can't we just say the play?” In the meantime, it seemed like Ahren was having a great time. Unlike me, she had an ability to roll with things. She was free; she went with it. She took to the work like a duck to water. I was jealous of that and that I had to share her attention with my
other fellow apprentices. “Wait a minute! That's my girlfriend. What are you doing?”

“Courtney, we're here with fifteen other people,” she'd tell me. “Stop trying to monopolize my time!”

I found living with all these people twenty-four hours a day way too intense. And the emotional work made my head feel like it was going to explode, like it was going to shatter! Once I snuck out of the stables in the middle of the night. I was so stressed out that I overcame my fear of the pitch black—we were deep in the woods; I was thinking “lions and tigers and bears!”—and felt my way tree-by-tree to the road. When I got there I shook a street sign to the ground and just howled and howled. When I was done crying and screaming, I walked the mile or so to back to The Mount, felt my way back through the woods to the stables and went to sleep. In class the next morning, while we were lying on our backs doing vocal exercises, one of my classmates said to me, “Did you hear that moose out there last night?”