Unbreak My Heart: A Memoir (22 page)

Yet Barry wasn’t the only one who wanted to change my musical style—even L.A. seemed to be trying to redefine me. “I’ve already had upbeat songs like ‘You’re Makin’ Me High’ and ‘Man Enough,’” I reminded L.A. But even still, he wanted me to include some sprinkles of hip-hop. That’s why L.A. wanted to include tracks like “Hit the Freeway”—which he picked R&B producer and tastemaker Pharrell to write. I’m a big Pharrell fan, and I liked the beat of the song. But he didn’t seem all that concerned about how my vocals sounded (even if I hit a wrong note, he kept it in!)—he was more focused on the emotion of the track. “I don’t want to do songs like ‘Hit the Freeway,’” I told him. “It doesn’t feel like me. I’m not a rapper.”

“You have to stay ahead of the curve,” L.A. kept telling me. “You see how Usher was ahead of the curve when the whole dance explosion hit?” But Usher is a male artist—and male artists can usually take more risks than female artists can. Of course I wanted to stay fresh and relevant—but I also wanted to stay true to my DNA. Even still, I allowed the voices of those managing me to drown out my opinion.

L.A. had just signed Robert Smith (who was then with Brandy) as a producer, so he also wanted me to work with Robert—so the whole album was very political. And not only was there a constant tug-of-war between Barry and L.A., but Clive and L.A. were often at odds. I felt like I was being tossed in every direction, trying to please both my record company and my management. And in the meantime, I did nothing to please myself.

Just as I was gearing up for the album’s release, I discovered that I was pregnant. Again. I was horribly sick with nausea—I could barely even keep down a cracker and a glass of soda water—and the doctor even put me on bed rest. The doctor also discovered that my placenta had become detached. The worst part of the situation is that when I asked the Arista execs if we could postpone my record by a few months, Barry told me that they refused—which I later wondered about. So
More Than a Woman
came out on November 19, 2002—and from the start, it was a disaster. I consider it the worst album I’ve done. Ever. It’s like that one-night stand you just don’t want to talk about.

Even before the record hit, there was drama: “No More Love” was leaked (the track, which sampled Luther Vandross’s song “Never Too Much,” was supposed to be our second single; the first was to be “Hit the Freeway”). But since “No More Love” was already out there, Arista decided not to include it on the final record. So my first single instead turned out to be “Hit the Freeway”—and it was the weakest debut of my career. It peaked at number eighty-six on the
Billboard
Hot 100 chart.

Things went downhill from there: The album didn’t catch on all that well. And with such a complicated pregnancy, I’d had no energy to fight with the record company—or to get out and really promote the new music once the album was finished. That’s exactly why I’d asked Arista to delay it so I could give birth first.

On March 31, 2003, my second son arrived—and yes, he was delivered by C-section, too. We named him Diezel Ky Braxton-Lewis. People often ask me how I came up with my sons’ names. Denim was originally supposed to be Denham. But in the hospital when I heard a nurse say, “How’s little Den Ham?” I decided right then and there that I needed to change the spelling to “Denim,” like the jeans, so that people would know how to pronounce it. Keri is half-German, and we wanted to celebrate that heritage with our second son’s name. So we named him after Rudolf Diesel, the German engineer who invented the diesel engine. We changed the “s” to a “z” just to personalize it.

Around this time, my manager Barry called me up one afternoon. “I’ve got some bad news for you, Toni,” he said. “L.A.’s about to drop you from the label.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“You’re just not selling as well as you need to sell,” he told me. I was stunned—in fact, I didn’t even respond.

I thought about Barry’s words over the next few days. Why would L.A. drop me without even talking to me about it? I was shocked that there was talk of dropping after just one flopped album—usually an artist gets two flops. I knew just one way to get a definite answer—and that was to ask L.A. myself. So I called L.A. directly. But what was true during the bankruptcy became true in this situation—he just didn’t respond. I then tried to get some answers from Kenny—and he said he’d heard that Barry was telling Arista that I wanted to be off the label. But to be honest, I wasn’t quite sure what to believe.

In the meantime, Barry continued whispering his warnings. “Arista is done with you,” he said. “It’s time for you to move on.” No matter how many times he repeated that, I found it hard to believe. Yet because L.A. had gone completely silent on me—and because my latest album had done pretty poorly—I started to think that Barry might be telling me the truth. “If you left Arista, I could get you signed on to another label right away,” Barry said, trying to persuade me. “You can make a comeback, Toni.” So in April 2003, I took a bold step: I left BMG and Arista.

At first, Barry claimed that he was shopping me around to different labels—and yet strangely, I wasn’t getting any calls or meetings. “Because of the bankruptcy,” he explained, “no one wants to touch you.” But after a few weeks, he stopped talking about other record companies and began playing up his own. “I’ll sign you,” he told me. “I know exactly how to promote your career. You should stick with me.” At a time when I was already feeling so confused and vulnerable amid a bankruptcy, I trusted him. So in the spring of 2003 I signed with Barry and Blackground Records.

“C
an I finish the show?” is not the question you’d expect to hear from an actress who has just collapsed. Yet during a September 2003 performance of
Aida
on Broadway, that’s exactly what I asked just before I was raced off to a hospital. Never mind that I’d just passed out—all I could think about was whether I would get through the show’s last half. Let me explain.

I’m a workhorse—always have been. Less than three months after I gave birth to Diezel—and a few weeks after I left Arista—I took a leading role in
Aida
at New York’s Palace Theatre. As our family’s primary breadwinner, I knew I needed to get back to work. I’d enjoyed my run in
Beauty and the Beast
, so I thought I’d give acting another try. So even though I’d felt a little pressure in my chest during Diezel’s birth—the same feeling I had back when I had asthma as a girl—I thought my asthma was just returning. So I dismissed the feeling and went right back to work.

One evening, I raced backstage to put on my costume for the last song of the first half before intermission. As I was stepping into a dress that my wardrobe stylist had ready for me, I began feeling light-headed—and then suddenly, everything went black. Out of the corner of his eye, the stage manager saw my whole body slump over onto my stylist. I lay against her, limp and lifeless—and then a few seconds later, my eyelids shot open. As if nothing had happened, I stood straight up. “Oh my God, I almost fell!” I said to the manager. He and the stylist were standing at my side with worried looks on their faces—and I was trying to figure out why.

“Toni, you didn’t just feel that?” said the stage manager. “You fainted.”

I stared at him blankly. “I didn’t faint!” I said insistently. “I just slipped a little.”

“No, you fell,” he said. “I saw you.”

I was so out of it that I hadn’t even realized I’d collapsed—and I pressed the manager to let me continue getting dressed. “Can I just complete the show?” I pleaded. “I think I can finish.”

He barely even let me get that statement all the way out before he cut in: “Absolutely not, Toni. No way. You fainted. Either you go to the hospital now yourself, or we’re calling an ambulance.” I definitely didn’t want them to call an ambulance because then word would get out about my episode—so a moment later, I hopped into the backseat of a black sedan, and a driver sped me off to Lenox Hill Hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

In the ER, I rushed right in to see the doctor. “What are your symptoms?” he asked.

“I just felt light-headed,” I said, “and I was told that I fainted—but I don’t remember it.” I then explained that I’d been having chest pains for the previous couple weeks.

“Let’s do an EKG,” he said. I did the electrocardiogram—and then the nurse came in and told me that the doctor also needed me to do an echocardiogram, which is an ultrasound of my heart.

“Is everything okay?” I asked the nurse.

She paused. “The doctor will be with your shortly,” she said—and the moment I heard that, I knew there must be a problem.

A half hour later, once the results were in, the doctor came to my room. “Miss Braxton,” he said, “you have pericarditis.”

My bottom lip trembled. “What’s that?” I said.

“Essentially, you caught a virus that attacked your heart.” He went on to explain that the condition is an inflammation of the pericardium, the sac that surrounds the heart.

“What causes it?” I asked.

“Many things can cause it,” he explained. “We want you to stay a few days so we can monitor your particular case.”

“But I can only stay one night because I have a show to do,” I said in protest.

He reluctantly agreed—and when he released me the next day, he sent me off with many prescriptions. “I want you to see a specialist,” the doctor told me. “I think lupus could be causing your pericarditis.”

My eyes widened. “What is lupus?” I asked. I’d heard of the condition before, but I really didn’t know much about it.

“Lupus is an autoimmune disorder in which the body attacks itself.” That sounded scary—but I consoled myself with the thought that the doctor’s theory wasn’t a definite diagnosis.

The following day, I returned to the show. Because I was on, like, eight hundred milligrams of Motrin every eight hours, plus steroids and anti-inflammatory drugs and a lot of other medications that made me drowsy, I could barely keep my eyes open from scene to scene. After a week of that exhaustion, I did as the doctor instructed and went to check in with a specialist. She ran more tests—but none of them came up positive for lupus. And because the first doctor had already started treating my pericarditis, my body’s inflammation started to go down. “The tests don’t show it,” she says, “but I believe you have lupus. If you were my sister, I would give you a prescription for Plaquenil.”

“Really?” I said. “I don’t want to take a drug if I’m not sure I have lupus.”

She understood that—so just to gather a bit more evidence, she ordered a series of tests including an ANA (antinuclear antibodies) test, which can show whether someone has an autoimmune disorder. My ANA test came back positive. “You have two symptoms of lupus—pericarditis and a positive ANA test,” the doctor told me. “I usually need three or four to make a diagnosis—but I still suspect you have lupus.”

For the next several weeks, I put that news in the back of my head so I could focus—I needed to finish my show. Toward the end of the show’s run in November, the specialist called me again. “I really think you should start on the Plaquenil,” she said insistently. I did—but I wanted a second opinion on whether I really needed it. So once I returned to Los Angeles, I went to my own primary care physician, Dr. Young, who referred me to another specialist. That doctor ran yet another round of tests. “Stop taking that Plaquenil immediately,” he told me. “Plaquenil is an antimalarial medication—and you don’t need to be on that for any reason. Your tests do not show you have lupus.”

I was relieved. “So what could be the cause of my symptoms?” I asked him.

“I’m not sure yet,” he said. “But let’s just keep testing you every six months and we’ll find out whether you really have the condition.” Over the next few years, I did as he suggested. And every single test came back with the exact same result—no lupus.

NOT VERY LONG
into my time at Blackground Records, Barry’s label, I knew I’d made a mistake—a major one. “Now that I’m on your label,” I told Barry one morning, “you can’t also be my manager.” We’d already agreed on that when we’d signed the record contract—but apparently, he’d forgotten.

“What do you mean, Toni?” he said. “Of course I can still manage you!”

But I wouldn’t give in on that point. So despite his disapproval, I brought in my own person, which made things tense. Barry did not want to work with anyone. Various people in the industry eventually came to me with stories of what Barry was telling Arista behind the scenes and how they thought that I had wanted to leave the label all along. Once I’d already left Arista, I received a FedEx package that provided one more small piece of evidence that Arista had never really been trying to get rid of me. In it was a square note card with a single line written across it: “I will always love you.” It was from L.A.

Barry was smart, and starting from the time when he managed me at Arista, he’d taught me a lot. I learned just how much of a dollars-and-cents business the music industry really is. He even taught me how to read people—and how to read between the lines. And though I knew he could sometimes be difficult to work with, it became more apparent once I signed with him. I didn’t make any immediate plans to leave Barry—but after some time, I knew I had to figure out how to break away from him. I had no idea how to even begin doing that.

Even I find it hard to believe that I actually enjoyed working on my fifth album. With so much negativity swirling around my relationship with Barry, you’d think that would’ve ruined the experience—but for a lot of it, I had my husband at my side. Keri continued to work as one of my producers, and the two of us teamed up on many of the songs. Barry actually let me pick my songs (at last . . . some artistic freedom!), and the tracks included a couple of my favorite tunes—“Please,” “Trippin’ (That’s the Way Love Works),” and an acoustic ballad I still love called “Shadowless.” During the time when we were making the album, I had a studio in my home, so Keri and I did a lot of our work from there. I even got to collaborate with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis (one of the hottest R&B and pop songwriting and production duos around). But because an issue arose over their payment, the songs we worked on didn’t actually make it onto the album. Even still, I was proud of our effort—and I felt “Libra” really reflected my musical taste.