Bad Motherfucker Read online

  Copyright © 2021 by Gavin Edwards

  Jacket design by Amanda Kain

  Jacket photograph © Patrick Hoelck

  Jacket copyright © 2021 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First Edition: October 2021

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2021943801

  ISBNs: 9780306924323 (hardcover); 9780306924309 (ebook)

  E3-20210908-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION Worth of the Cool

  1 Half a Piece of Candy

  2 Desk Lamp (with Bulb)

  3 Little Cooked Onions

  4 Bill Cosby’s Sweaters

  5 The Films of Samuel L. Jackson, 1977–1988

  6 Emergency Cord

  7 The Films of Samuel L. Jackson, 1989–1991

  8 Brown Envelope

  9 The Films of Samuel L. Jackson, 1992–1994

  10 Two Lights and Some Batteries

  11 The Films of Samuel L. Jackson, 1995–1998

  12 Engraved Handle

  13 The Films of Samuel L. Jackson, 1999–2001

  14 Berry Popsicles

  15 The Films of Samuel L. Jackson, 2002–2004

  16 Rental Clubs

  17 The Films of Samuel L. Jackson, 2005–2007

  18 Eye Patch

  19 The Films of Samuel L. Jackson, 2008–2011

  20 Hot Poker

  21 The Films of Samuel L. Jackson, 2012–2015

  22 French Braid

  23 The Films of Samuel L. Jackson, 2016–2018

  24 Alligator Loafers

  25 The Films of Samuel L. Jackson, 2019–2021

  26 Greenhouse Roof

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  Look-at-Me Business

  Sources

  Also by Gavin Edwards

  For Jeff Jackson (no relation)

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  INTRODUCTION Worth of the Cool

  I say ‘cool’ all the time,” Samuel L. Jackson told me. Jackson believed that “cool” was his second-most-used word but conceded that he didn’t always wield it precisely, offering examples such as “Oh, yeah, that’s cool” or “Oh, that would be very cool” or just “Cool.” The most frequently uttered word in his vocabulary? You can probably guess it, but more on those four syllables soon.

  “Hot,” “hip,” and “cool” have different meanings, even if they’re sometimes used interchangeably on magazine covers. “Hot” delineates what is desirable in this moment: the new trend, the sex symbol, the consumer object so perfectly crafted that it unites the sins of lust and avarice. “Hip” is the state of enlightenment that leads to understanding the hidden architecture of square society. But “cool”? Cool is hip put into action; cool is necessary to make something hot. Cool is a way of life.

  They’re all social constructs, but while “hot” is evanescent and “hip” is malleable, “cool” is the value that endures. When you’re cool enough, you’re unruffled by the gyrations of popular culture, even as they spin faster and faster. And if you’re really cool? Then you’re Samuel L. Jackson.

  What makes Jackson cool? To better understand the man, consider him playing a supporting role that’s not among his best-loved or most-quoted: John “Ray” Arnold, the harried administrator in Jurassic Park who chain-smokes his way through the crisis when the power fails and the genetically engineered dinosaurs escape from their cages.

  “I never feel like he’s going to run up against somebody that he doesn’t have the guts to confront,” Hollywood screenwriter Matthew Aldrich said of Jackson. “But it’s the fearlessness that comes from experience, as opposed to bravado, which is the opposite. I think back to Jurassic Park, where this whole movie he’s got this hangdog look and always has this cigarette limply hanging from his mouth. I don’t know how, but you can tell that somehow he has been here and done that already: this is like the third time he’s worked at a park with dinosaurs, and he knows every way this is going to screw up.”

  Cool is calm in the face of a crisis. Cool is also the way you walk, the way you wear your hat, and the way you don’t care what other people think of your life choices. Cool is a mask that you wear out in the world; if you put it on just right, it becomes your face.

  And so Samuel L. Jackson has brought his personal cool to dozens of movie roles: gangsters and secret agents; superheroes and supervillains; Jedi and DJs; hit men, con men, and G-men. He’s starred in Hard Eight, The Hateful Eight, and 1408. He’s acted in over 140 feature films in his career: more than Bill Murray and Tom Hanks put together. Because of his popularity, his relentless work ethic, and his willingness to play supporting roles in films big and small, he’s achieved the largest cumulative box office of any movie star ever: as of 2021, over $8.1 billion in the USA and $19.4 billion worldwide. Asked about the record, Jackson will point out that most of that money “didn’t end up in my pocket.” But the residuals don’t hurt: “I get paid all day, every day,” he said. “Which is almost too much for a sensitive artist.”

  Jackson’s a first-rate actor with a wider range than most people realize, but he doesn’t appear in all those movies because he’s a chameleon who disappears into each role with a new accent, barely recognizable as himself. He gets cast because he’s cool: audiences not only enjoy spending time with him, they feel comfortable when he’s onscreen, knowing that the movie’s in good hands.

  If cool is a mask that we wear in public, then what does it mean to be an actor known for playing cool roles? It means that the mask fits more naturally every time you put it on, and that it leaves an impression on your face. It means that people remember how you looked the last time you wore it—and are ready to believe that it isn’t actually a mask at all.

  Consider Lester Young (1909–1959), a jazz saxophonist who played in the Kansas City style. He’s best known as a sideman to Count Basie and Billie Holiday, but one of the coolest people on the planet once told me a secret: Young’s “Back to the Land,” if played daily, could be a balm for the soul. (It’s true.)

  All jazzmen circa 1943 lived outside the cultural mainstream, but even in that demimonde, Young was an unusual figure. In an era not rich with gender ambiguity, he grew his hair long, gestured in a way people found effeminate, and routinely called other men “lady.” Although his most famous nickname was “Prez,” the other musicians in Basie’s band called him “Miss Thing.” Was
Young gay? When asked, he said, “I never even auditioned!”

  Young was a brilliant musician (arguably Holiday’s greatest collaborator) and a pioneer gender bender, but his greatest legacy may be linguistic. Musician John Lewis said, “He was a living, walking poet. He was so quiet that when he talked, each sentence came out like a little explosion.” Among Young’s idiosyncratic slang terms: “Johnny Deathbed” for a sick person, “deep sea diver” for a particularly adept bass player, and most lastingly, “cool,” in the modern sense of chilled-out hipness. (The word previously had negative connotations in American slang: Hemingway’s 1939 short story “Night Before Battle,” for example, included the dialogue “I’d like to cool you, you rummy fake Santa Claus.”)

  When there’s no written record, it can be difficult to pinpoint who coined a particular slang term—if you want to fall into a rabbit hole sometime, try to figure out the earliest usage of “mullet” and whether Mike D of the Beastie Boys invented the term for the haircut or just popularized it—but a multitude of musicians who knew Young gave him the credit for “cool.” One of the coolest cats ever gave us the vocabulary we needed to describe him and his impact.

  To see the oral tradition of “cool” in action, think of Samuel L. Jackson teaching a young woman how to be cool. You may remember the moment: it happened in a Los Angeles diner, and he gave the lesson totally unfazed by the fact that she had a gun aimed at him most of the time. But as he told one of the two small-time stickup artists collecting people’s wallets, “I hate to shatter your ego, but this ain’t the first time I’ve had a gun pointed at me.” As ever, Jackson had the fearlessness that comes with experience.

  After he deposited his wallet in the bag held by Tim Roth, but before he gave a close reading of scripture, Jackson took charge of the situation, disarming Roth and jabbing his own gun into Roth’s neck. The woman—Amanda Plummer—understandably freaked out, pointed her own gun at Jackson, and threatened to kill him.

  “We’re all going to be like three little Fonzies here,” Jackson told her. “And what’s Fonzie like?”

  She fell silent, twitching, overwhelmed by the standoff.

  “Come on, Yolanda, what’s Fonzie like?” he shouted.

  “Cool?” she offered hesitantly, desperate to get the answer right.

  “What?”

  “Cool,” she said, a hair more confidently.

  “Correctamundo!”

  The lessons of cool, as learned in the Hawthorne Grill in the final scene of Pulp Fiction: Stay calm in an emergency. Apply your overarching philosophy to the smaller moments of your existence. Walk in the footsteps of your cool predecessors.

  The Fonz was cool, even if it was cool as distilled through a 1970s sitcom: Henry Winkler played Arthur “Fonzie” Fonzarelli with such tough-guy élan that even later-season misadventures (most famously, Fonzie on water skis and in a leather jacket, jumping over a shark) diminished the show rather than the character.

  Some other members of the Cool Hall of Fame: Questlove. Keith Richards. Nina Simone. Prince. Robert Mitchum. Patti Smith. Frida Kahlo. Leonard Cohen. Poly Styrene. Serena Williams. Alan Turing. Richard Pryor. Calvin (the tiger king, not the sixteenth-century theologian). Toshiro Mifune. There are many more; you will have your own nominations.

  Impeccably cool pop star Harry Styles watched Pulp Fiction for the first time when he was just thirteen years old: “probably too young,” he admitted. He imprinted on Jackson playing Jules Winnfield and wanting to follow the master, “saved up money from my paper route to buy a ‘Bad Motherfucker’ wallet. Just a stupid white kid in the English countryside with that wallet.”

  “Cool,” like so many of humanity’s bedrock inventions, really started in Africa. The concept of coolness—often associated with water, chalk, and any other substance that renders you so fresh and so clean—extends across many African languages. In Yoruba, “enun tutu” means “cool mouth,” while in Kikuyu, “kanua kohoro” means “cool tongue”: both describe the power of keeping silent instead of running your fool mouth.

  “This is the mask of mind itself,” art historian Robert Farris Thompson wrote of these idioms and how they shaped behavior. Thompson distilled this West African definition of cool: “The ability to be nonchalant at the right moment, to reveal no emotion in situations where excitement and sentimentality are acceptable—in other words, to act as though one’s mind were in a different world.”

  The idea of emotional reserve is found in non-African cultures: you may be familiar with French sangfroid or the British pride in keeping a stiff upper lip. What distinguished the African version of stoicism was that coolness was an important posture not just in times of stress, but during celebrations and dances. It took real talent to look casual during those exuberant, expressive moments: that’s why we marvel at movie actors who retain their cool, even while engaged in absurd exercises in make-believe, such as interacting with computer-generated extraterrestrials in front of a bright green screen.

  Actor Hugh Laurie once told me that the quality of detached cool was why Cary Grant might have been the greatest of all twentieth-century film stars: “He always looked aware of the fact that he was in a film. He was amused by his predicament: not the predicament of his character but the predicament of Cary Grant in a film.”

  Or as Thompson put it, describing unruffled detachment in the African context: “Manifest within this philosophy of the cool is the belief that the purer, the cooler a person becomes, the more ancestral he becomes. In other words, mastery of self enables a person to transcend time and elude preoccupation.”

  In a cloud of cigarette smoke, jazz musicians were the modern American architects of the attitude that Lester Young gave the name of cool—with beatnik writers following right behind them. In 1957, Miles Davis released the album Birth of the Cool, collecting recordings he made with musicians who included saxophonist Gerry Mulligan and drummer Max Roach, responding to the heated invention of bebop by opening the doors to the chill-out room. That same year, Jack Kerouac published On the Road, an autobiographical novel composed on a single roll of paper that inspired a generation to head out on the New Jersey Turnpike to look for America.

  In his autobiography, Davis acknowledged the inspiration of white bandleader Claude Thornhill on those sessions, but took pains to strip any white influences out of his story: “We were trying to sound like Claude Thornhill, but he had gotten his shit from Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson.” Given that the music of Ellington and Henderson blended jazz and African music with European symphonic traditions, this isn’t as pure a through line as Davis touted. While coolness is sometimes just code for Blackness, cool in the United States doesn’t exist without a variety of racial influences mingling in a complex legacy.

  Also in 1957, Central High School in Little Rock was integrated by nine African American teenagers. (The governor of Arkansas sent out the Arkansas National Guard to stop the teens from entering the school; President Dwight Eisenhower responded by federalizing the Arkansas National Guard and ordering them to protect the students.) The Little Rock Nine walked to school through a jeering white mob, serene and self-possessed, maintaining their cool in the face of mortal danger. One of them, Minnijean Brown-Trickey, later said, “What bothered them was that we were as arrogant as they were.”

  In Chattanooga, Tennessee, four hundred miles east of Little Rock, 1957 marked the ninth birthday of Samuel L. Jackson, also living in a segregated world. The older he got, the more white people he knew, but when he was a child, almost everyone he met was Black. Growing up under segregation didn’t make Jackson angry: it forged his steely cool. But as an adult, he became enraged by the voices of conservative politicians, inheritors to the traditions of his childhood oppressors. “They’re the same fucking guys,” he said. “And when I hear their voices, I hear the same voices. Those twangs where they didn’t specifically call you ‘nigger,’ they said ‘nigra.’ ‘The nigras.’ There was no doubt about where they stood—that you were never going
to be their equal and, if possible, they were going to make sure you never had as much shit as they had.”

  Miles Davis began his autobiography by writing, “The greatest feeling I ever had in my life—with my clothes on—was when I first heard Diz and Bird together.” The year was 1944; Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker were playing together in Billy Eckstine’s band, inventing the bop sound every night. Parker (aka Bird) became an icon of cool for both his visionary genius and his dissolute lifestyle: shooting up heroin, pissing in phone booths, pawning his horn right before a gig so he could score and then getting brilliant sounds out of a last-minute substitute, such as a child’s plastic saxophone. When Parker died, just thirty-four years old, the coroner estimated his age as somewhere between fifty and sixty years old.

  Gillespie, on the other hand, lived to age seventy-five, married to the same woman for over fifty years. Although he had an impeccably cool CV, having been an innovator both of bebop and Afro-Cuban jazz, he didn’t feel the compulsion to burn himself out like his partner. In his New Jersey home, the icebox held a stash of nonalcoholic beer; asked about his abstemious nature, Gillespie used to joke, “I was always afraid of needles.” He knew that his cool wasn’t built on self-destruction.

  While Samuel L. Jackson cultivated a hellacious addiction to freebasing cocaine, he ultimately chose Dizzy’s path instead of Bird’s: getting clean after he turned forty, he then proceeded not just to stick around for a few more decades but to do his best work. When he wasn’t on a movie set, he didn’t show up at hot clubs or in tabloid photographs: he played golf and binge-watched Law & Order. “Most people would be surprised at how boring my life actually is,” he confessed. But when he was working, he transformed into an international movie star—and he seemed to be working all the time, often making five or six movies in a year.

  Growing up, Jackson played a variety of brass and woodwind instruments. He fantasized about being a jazz musician—a dream that ended abruptly in eleventh grade when he discovered that he wasn’t a good musical improviser. But he had already absorbed the jazzman code of cool, and it turned out that Jackson did just fine working from a script.