Authors: Danny White
He had plenty to escape from: not just the material poverty but also the emotional issues that arise in single-parent households. Reports have found that children in single-parent families are
five times more likely to develop emotional problems than those living with both parents. They are also three times as likely to become aggressive or badly behaved. Will’s essentially good
behaviour as a child is therefore all the more to be admired.
Also present in the family house were other members of the clan, as Elizabeth Gutierrez, a childhood friend of Will,
explained to the
Mirror
. Pointing at the house
the family lived in, she said: ‘Will lived there with his grandmother Sarah, mother, Debra, his two uncles, an aunt and some siblings. They were the only black family here – everyone
else is Mexican. They didn’t have much money, no one around here does. But they were really nice.’ Indeed, for Will, his strong, and ‘really nice’ family helped keep him
happy despite their humble surroundings. The love simply transcended any tests that were thrown at them. ‘For me, with my mum and my family and my upbringing … it was heaven,’ he
told the
Guardian
. ‘It was wonderful, because of my family.’ Also weighing-in to his upbringing were four uncles: ‘my Uncle Donnie, my Uncle Rendal Fay, my Uncle Lynn, my
Uncle Roger. Those are my mother’s brothers. Not the Smothers Brothers.’
We all fantasize both about magical futures and also parallel presents. For Will, the need to imagine other worlds was especially keen, as his reality was tough and stark. In some interviews, he
has been far less romantic about his childhood than he was in the chat with the
Guardian
mentioned above. It was a rough neighbourhood: ‘There were a lot of gangs. A lot of my
friends are dead, were in prison, on drugs or were selling drugs.’
To this day, Will feels relief that he did not meet such a fate himself. How he did so is little mystery to him, as
he simply followed one of the two respectable paths he
felt were open to him. ‘You either joined the gang or you did arts or sports,’ he continued. ‘My attire got me through, though. The louder you dressed, it became obvious that you
were not in a gang.’ As we shall see, the legacy of this ‘hard-knock’ childhood showed up in other ways when he began to make his fortune later in life. It would make it hard for
him to understand the intricacies of his finances. ‘When you are from the ghetto there is no financial literacy,’ he said.
Nowadays, Will spends a lot of his time in England, where he found a parallel neighbourhood that reminded him of Boyle Heights. Surprisingly, this was not in an inner-city region of London,
Manchester or another metropolis. Instead, he found England’s equivalent of Boyle Heights in Somerset of all places. Will ran through the area during his mile with the Olympic torch in 2012.
‘There’s one area, it’s like a village of houses and it looked like the neighbourhood I came from in Boyle Heights, where the neighbours looked after the neighbours, and it looked
like a real community and that reminded me of the community I come from,’ he said afterwards, to the amusement of some in both Britain and America. Despite the picture of neighbourly
co-operation Will paints, the harsher realities of his life remained hard to ignore.
At the same time as he was enduring those realities, his future Black Eyed Peas bandmates were also experiencing hardships of their own. Indeed, the childhoods of the band
would shape the bond they would later form. Will’s bandmate, Taboo, for instance, has estimated that ‘sixty per cent’ of the ‘hood’ in which he grew up were gangsters.
He recalls going to sleep to a soundtrack of violent ‘bedlam’ in the parking lot, and has also written of the ever-present smell of cannabis that he describes as ‘this scent of
childhood’. As Will had done, Taboo watched his mother work ‘her ass off’ to provide for the family. Will is in no sense angry or bitter as a result of the challenges of his
childhood. ‘I’m pretty blessed to be able to share all those experiences, from living around Mexicans to going to church with all black people,’ Will told the
Phoenix New
Times
. ‘I don’t look at it as, “Wow, I’m the only one – fuck you.” I look at it as, “Wow, I’m blessed to be able to relate”.’ The
reader who appreciates such examples of people turning a challenge or setback into a positive will find much to enjoy in the pages and chapters ahead.
*
The first school Will attended was an hour’s bus ride away from the family home. It was called Paul Revere Junior School, named after the famous American patriot, and it
provided the building blocks for the education of a future American star. He enjoyed reading, particularly the series produced by one of children’s fiction’s most
enduring authors. ‘I liked Dr Seuss,’ he told
The New York Times
. Even as young as nine years of age, Will was not only falling in love with music, nor was he only dreaming of
a future career in the music industry – he was actively working towards making that goal come true. In fact, as far as Will was concerned, it was not a dream or a goal, but an inevitability.
He was going to succeed. To that end, he experimented in his room, recording himself singing and rapping over backing tracks. As well as honing his vocal skills, he was also trying to learn how
music production worked.
One track he ‘produced’ as a kid was of him rapping over the Bob Dylan track ‘Forever Young’. (Later in life he would follow the same path for a Pepsi promotion.) He also
practised dance moves, honing the various skills he knew he would need to succeed. So it was early in life, then, that Will’s hyperactivity surfaced. Indeed, he was diagnosed – formally
or informally, we do not know which – with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). ‘Yeah, when I was a kid, they said I had ADD, or whatever,’ he told the
Radio
Times
. ‘They said I was hyper. ADHD? AHHD? Whatever. That’s cool. Actually, I’ve made it work for the best for me. And my mom encouraged me in everything I did.’
Indeed she did. At the age of ten, Will got to see a new kind of life after being given a significant opportunity when his mother sent him to school in a wealthy
neighbourhood near Pacific Palisades. The Magnet Program, designed to offer specialized educational opportunities to children from any part of society, regardless of family income or background,
helped ease his passage to a better school in a better area.
In Los Angeles there’s a saying: If you’re famous you live in the Hollywood Hills, if you’re rich you live in Beverly Hills, and if you’re lucky you live in Pacific
Palisades. Will must have felt lucky indeed as he arrived in this area each morning: the contrast between it and Boyle Heights is striking. Despite the accuracy of the saying about the district,
the reality is slightly more complicated. Famous and rich people do live in Pacific Palisades, but they are often down-to-earth celebrities, those who do not buy into the game of hiding behind
literal, metaphorical and brickwork sunglasses. This is a district in which accomplished people live a normal, albeit comfortable, existence. Famous names who have lived there include Ben Affleck,
Larry David, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ray Liotta, Ozzy Osbourne and Steven Spielberg. This opened Will’s eyes to the possibilities that fame and fortune can bring. Summing up the difference between
where he lived and where he studied, Will told an
audience of British students that the gap was: ‘Culture-wise and distance … like sending a kid from London to
France for school.’
The sense of opportunity and its rich reward is strong in the neighbourhood, which is little short of heavenly in some parts. It is difficult not to be inspired and enlivened. It was, therefore,
a significant moment when his mother decided to send Will there. ‘She wanted me to be challenged,’ he explained. One of the challenges was raised by the demographics of his school. He
went from being the only black boy in a predominantly Latino neighbourhood to being the only black boy in a predominantly white school.
The establishment he attended was called the Palisades Charter High School. For him, the basic truth about this area was the most pertinent: ‘it isn’t a ghetto’. It would turn
out to be a fateful moment in his life story. However, more immediately these were long days for Will. He would be waiting for the school bus just after 6 a.m. each day, which meant he sometimes
missed breakfast. ‘And when you’re on food stamps and lunch tickets, missing breakfast is not good for a kid,’ he told the
Financial Times
. He was a member of the school
choir and an enthusiastic participator in other extra-curricular activities, so Will rarely returned home until 8 p.m. Looking back on the opportunity, Will is not one to complain. Without the
Magnet Program, he
said, he ‘would never have seen what the world was like … I would be stuck thinking the world was the five miles of my surrounding
area.’
Comparing the wealthy neighbourhood he travelled to for his schooling, and the ghetto district in which he grew up, Will sensed that in the latter area, the encouragement to disaster was almost
inevitable. ‘There’s a family of influences that dictate behaviour,’ he told the
Financial Time
s. ‘In the ghetto, there’s a liquor store, a cheque-cashing
place and a motel. What that tells you psychologically is: get a cheque, cash it. Take a couple of steps. Buy some liquor and get drunk, go home and get kicked out of your house. And here’s a
place to sleep along the way.’ In contrast, he said, in richer areas the set-up encourages more positive behaviour. He was learning plenty at school, yet Will’s education was also
self-administered – merely by keeping his eyes open and his wits about him at all times.
Former classmates of Will remember him as a charismatic and charming boy. Yvette Bucio told the
Mirror
: ‘I used to ride the bus with Will or “Willy” as we called him.
He was exactly the same then as he is now – stylish, attractive and charming. He used to get along with everybody whether they were white, black, Mexican or whatever. After he left, he wrote
next to my picture in the yearbook that he had a crush on me. I was really flattered. But then I found out he
did the same to all the girls.’ It seems he was quite the
amiable politician even back then. Quite the singer, too: Angelica Pereyra, another former classmate of Will’s, recalled how he began freestyle rapping contests in the playground. The boy who
would later appear as a judge on a talent contest was a skilled organizer. ‘He was great and everyone used to gather round him and start cheering and shouting,’ said Pereyra. ‘The
teachers would always run over because they thought a fight was going on.’ Instead, what they were witnessing were the first live performances from a boy who would later sell out the
world’s biggest stadiums and arenas.
Meanwhile, as his adolescence continued, Will’s sexual awakening was beginning. Given the element of mystery that has long surrounded his romantic life, the origins of it are fascinating.
Naturally, those origins are less than straightforward, too. As a teenager he fantasized about Charo, the flamboyant and vivacious Latina television personality. She had already been famous for the
best part of a decade when she first came to young Will’s attention in the early 1980s. With her trademark saying ‘cuchi-cuchi’ – often accompanied by a sassy wiggle of her
hips – Charo caught the attention of many males. ‘I loved me some Charo,’ Will told
Elle
magazine. ‘Back in the 80s, she was everywhere –
The Love Boat,
Fantasy Island
.’ He says he enjoyed watching her wherever she appeared.
Will’s sexuality is the subject of mystery and conjecture. By his own admission, his introduction to sex was unconventional. When the subject of masturbation was
alluded to by one interviewer, Will offered the information that: ‘I didn’t do that until I was nineteen.’ So, while his male school friends will undoubtedly have been exploring
themselves enthusiastically, Will refrained from doing so until he was comfortably into manhood. Asked why, he replied: ‘I think my mom had a big role in it. It was a subject we never talked
about growing up.’ Stranger still was that he hinted that he had lost his virginity a year before, when he was eighteen. It was a less than romantic experience as he describes it: ‘her
mother was in the other room; it was horrible. And then she cheated on me. But I stayed with her, like a bonehead.’
Will’s explanation that his mother’s lack of commentary about sex as she raised him was responsible for his abstinence is intriguing. It is hard to not speculate that there must be
more to it, though. Few mothers, after all, would discuss the subject regularly, even at all, with their children. Perhaps he is, cryptically or even subconsciously, referring more to the absence
of a father figure. Without an authoritative male voice to discuss the birds and the bees with him, it seems he learned about sex and romance more delicately than he might have. ‘Because I
was raised around girls, I think I’ve
adopted that perspective on sex,’ he has admitted.
Even back then, Will was living around the rules that his mother constructed for his relationships with girls. ‘She was real strict, but she could be lenient,’ he told the
Guardian
. ‘I couldn’t bring girls in the house but she let me talk on the phone. And my phone bill was high. I’d been with my first girlfriend, Carmen Perez, for three
months before she kissed me. I told my ma, who was like, “I didn’t send you to school to be acting mannish”.’ She had, it seems, somewhat delicate expectations for her
son.
Delicate is not, however, a word that can be used to describe all elements of his development. There were some harsh punishments meted out at home. His mother told him: ‘I am your
daddy.’ She was as good as her word, inflicting physical punishment when she felt it necessary. For instance, when he was at high school, Will developed a habit of scrawling graffiti. He used
to write the word ‘expo’ – an abbreviation of exposure – on walls and other surfaces. The thrill of graffiti has never quite left Will. In later life he would be caught by
the police, but back at high school it was his Uncle Fay who busted him. He duly reported Will to his mother, saying: ‘Debra! Willie over there writing on them walls!’ Debra was
furious. She called Will into the house and told him: ‘Sit your butt down on the couch!’ Will feared a formidable ticking off – but he received more than
that.
‘She started hitting me,’ he told
Elle
.