Bad Motherfucker Page 5

  As soon as she was gone, Dr. Burroughs turned around, took her production book, marked it with a big red F, and threw it back on the pile. “He saw her reflection in the window,” Jackson said.

  That night, Jackson went to the theater, reporting for his first rehearsal as a drama major. Richardson, as usual, was backstage. They had their first conversation, but not for long—she had to leave for a recording session, doing some backup vocals for the Commodores.

  Jackson threw himself into the drama major, doing as many plays as possible. When he was a freshman, he had been taken aback by the Vietnam veterans and their seriousness of purpose: now he was acting like one of them. He was at Morehouse for a reason, and that reason was theater. He did as many productions as he could with the Morehouse Spelman Players, but he also joined a student troupe called the Black Image Theater Company.

  Black Image was a funhouse-mirror version of the pageants that Jackson had done with Aunt Edna as a child: Black students doing variety shows for the edification of white audiences. There was a fundamental difference, however: the Black Image actors referred to their productions as “Hate Whitey Theater.”

  The cast members would run out and shout, “Die, whitey! Die, whitey, so Black folks can take over!” The performance would include dancing, drumming, recitations of consciousness-raising poetry by Amiri Baraka (then known as LeRoi Jones), and performances by a singing group in the style of the Supremes—here called the Supremacists. Their shows began as guerrilla street theater but soon drew a wider audience than expected. “People were paying us to do this stuff,” Jackson marveled. “We were going to Tulane and Florida State and all sorts of big white schools and they were like, ‘Yes, yes, denigrate us! Denigrate us, do it!’”

  Jackson got used to performing under the influence of drugs and booze; it was not only tolerated in the drama department, but encouraged. “If you’re going to do it, do it like the great ones,” Dr. Burroughs told his students. They knew what that meant: “The great ones got blind,” Jackson said. “So we started out in the morning drinking wine or bourbon and got to an eight o’clock class and then all afternoon we worked in the shop, building sets while drinking more and smoking a joint, and by the time 7:30 rehearsal rolled around we were stoned. But because we rehearsed stoned, we knew the lines so we could perform stoned.”

  When Jackson returned to Morehouse, he intended to marry a girl he had known before he left, a Spelman student named Lucene Moore. But two weeks after he got back together with Lucene, he had his first real conversation with LaTanya Richardson, who he had been noticing in the periphery of his world for years: on the plane to Memphis, coming in the second-floor window of Harkness Hall, sneaking her homework into the dean’s office. “We started talking and boom! I knew she was the person for me,” Jackson said. “From then on, we were always together.”

  Richardson, born October 21, 1949 (one year younger than Jackson), grew up in Atlanta, a fact she took pride in, even calling the city by the nickname “the Mecca of the South.” When she was a child, her family home was a hub of the civil rights movement: on Sunday afternoons, after church services, local ministers would drop in for fried chicken and potato salad before meeting to discuss the next steps in the struggle. Growing up, Richardson thought she was going to be a doctor—but when she saw the musical Camelot, she fell in love with the theater. (Being part of King Arthur’s court seemed impractical.) “When you think about what acting actually is, it’s a very unnatural thing to do as a vocation,” she said. “It needs to be somewhere inside you.”

  Richardson, who started acting when she was fifteen, made sure that she attended the Atlanta performances of great actors on tour, such as Ruby Dee, Cicely Tyson, and Geraldine Page—not to mention the Negro Ensemble Company. In the movies, she loved Bette Davis: “It’s horrible to say, but she’s why I started smoking!” But the essential, inspirational influence: Diahann Carroll in the TV series Julia, the groundbreaking sitcom that ran from 1968 to 1971 in which Carroll played a nurse and a widowed single mother. Carroll “made everything seem possible,” Richardson said. “I was always emboldened by the idea that I was going to succeed.”

  After Jackson graduated from Morehouse in 1972, his life continued much like before; he and Richardson stayed in Atlanta and did as many plays as they possibly could. They moved into a small apartment building on Seventh Street in downtown Atlanta: the rent was cheap, but the rooms were large, and there were wooden floors and fireplaces. The other five units in the building were also occupied by actors, mostly friends of Jackson and Richardson. “It was like living in a little bohemian community,” said one of those neighbors, Albert Cooper. “We hung out, talked, read books, made families.”

  One acting job for both Jackson and Richardson: children’s improvisational drama, as sponsored by the Academy Theatre (the first integrated theater in the South). For a show called “Something in a Box,” the five-member cast would visit elementary schools, bringing along one piece of scenery: a refrigerator box that had been painted with various backgrounds. After asking the children to write down their fears on slips of paper, the performers would pick two or three slips and act the fears out, helping the children to conquer them. “We would also get the kid who wrote down that fear,” Jackson said, and give the child “a product called Dr Woolapowers Placating Placebo.”

  Every six weeks, there seemed to be another play opening that featured Jackson, or Richardson, or both. “I know what it’s like to stand there and trade lines with Sam Jackson for an hour and something,” said Cooper. “He is a powerhouse of an actor—he makes you raise your game.” But as well-regarded as Jackson was in the Atlanta theater scene, Richardson was held in even higher esteem. The couple aspired to be the Black version of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. “Sam and Tanya set the tone for quality acting and quality theater,” Cooper said. And when Jackson wasn’t onstage, he was in the audience, where he also made his presence known: at a performance of Melvin Van Peebles’s play Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death, Cooper said, Jackson “was standing up, screaming, and pumping his fist.”

  Atlanta was home to multiple Black theater companies, most notably the People’s Survival Theater. Some of them featured a mélange of poetry and dance and drums, but the Jackson/Richardson cohort was more interested in traditional plays (which could include musicals, although the men drew the line at wearing leotards). When they heard of an Atlanta impresario looking for a new Black theater company he could present, the result was the Just Us Theater Company, whose founders included Richardson, Jackson, Cooper, and Bill Nunn.

  One particularly memorable Jackson performance was in Purlie, the musical based on Ossie Davis’s play Purlie Victorious—he played the lead role of a fast-talking preacher in the segregated South. (Cleavon Little won a Tony in 1970 for originating the role on Broadway.) Jackson had learned to carry a tune adequately and wasn’t afraid to belt out songs like “Newfangled Preacher Man.” “It’s important to me that people hear the lyrics,” Jackson said. “I always considered myself an Ethel Merman-type singer.”

  As the 1960s moved further into the past, Jackson progressed from his life as a hippie, trying new things—even learning to box at his local YMCA. He put away the Jimi Hendrix headbands and the “Free Angela Davis” T-shirt. “In the seventies I went Edwardian,” he said. “Slim-cut clothes, double-breasted jackets with big lapels.”

  Atlanta in the 1970s was not the hub of film production that it later became, but some productions shot there—including That Old Sweet Song, a made-for-TV movie about a Detroit family on a southern vacation, starring Cicely Tyson. Cooper and Jackson scored some work as stand-ins; they were thrilled to be on a real movie set, watching the professionals, and noted the precision with which the production ran. “It’s scheduled down to the minute,” Cooper marveled.

  Another movie, Together for Days, was made in Atlanta for just $600,000. It was a blaxploitation movie about an interracial romance, notable mostly because of what
various participants did later on: the female lead, Lois Chiles, went on to be a Bond girl (Holly Goodhead in Moonraker). The director, Michael Schultz, made Cooley High, The Last Dragon, and four Richard Pryor movies. And Stan, the eleventh-billed role in the cast, was played by one Samuel L. Jackson.

  With terrible reviews and no distribution deal, the movie was barely released in 1972, sneaking into a few theaters; it was later renamed Black Cream, with no greater success. (Tagline on the poster: “A brother’s struggle for identity!”) It never came out on video and hasn’t been seen in decades; “Don’t go looking for it,” Jackson warned. The movie didn’t make Jackson rich or famous, but it did gain him membership in the Screen Actors Guild—crucially, having a SAG card allows you to audition for a better class of projects.

  More lucrative and much more widely seen was the commercial Jackson filmed for Krystal, the southern hamburger chain. After a woman in pigtails testifies that she once ate twelve Krystal burgers in a single sitting (not as gluttonous as it might sound: they’re small, square sliders), but before the announcer assures you that Krystal is the one place in town where you can eat a lot of good food and still not spend a lot of money, Jackson, wearing a necktie, appears to explain the burgers’ appeal: “Probably it’s these little cooked onions.”

  Jackson had some local fame: he loved the thrill of strangers recognizing him from plays, even if they called him by his character’s name, or people calling out “Probably it’s these little cooked onions!” if they saw him on the street. “It was the best feeling in the world,” he said. But he was having trouble getting noticed outside the 404 area code.

  Roots, the acclaimed miniseries about the history of Alex Haley’s African American family, from eighteenth-century Gambia through slavery and the U.S. Civil War, was a television landmark when it aired in January 1977. With eight generation-spanning episodes and dozens of juicy roles, it was practically a full-employment program for Black actors circa 1976—but not for Jackson. “I’ve been told that I wasn’t African enough or not an exotic Negro,” he complained. “What does that mean?”

  Meanwhile, Richardson had appeared in a production of Gore Vidal’s play The Best Man, about the backroom jockeying of presidential candidates at a political convention, starring E. G. Marshall. Joseph Papp, the producer who was founder of Shakespeare in the Park and the Public Theater in New York City, attended a performance while he was visiting Atlanta. Papp met Richardson backstage and told her, “You definitely need to be in New York. Come see me.”

  That was all the encouragement Richardson needed. Jackson consented: they weren’t going to become the Black Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton by doing regional theater in Georgia. They paid their rent in Atlanta through October 1976 and drove north, arriving in New York City on October 31. Some friends on Barrow Street, in the West Village, had invited the couple to stay with them for a while.

  Their first impression of New York wasn’t what they expected: “We pulled into the Village at night and everyone on the street looked really bizarre,” Jackson said. The streets of the city were filled with samba bands and drag queens and enormous puppets. “What we didn’t realize was that it was Halloween and we were in the middle of a parade,” Jackson said. “I saw a nun crossing the street with a guy in a diaper. And the nun turned around and had a big green beard. I said, ‘I guess we’ve arrived.’”

  Todd Radom.

  4 Bill Cosby’s Sweaters

  LaTanya Richardson didn’t waste time: the next day, she headed straight for Joseph Papp’s office at the Public Theater. She told the receptionist, “Mr. Papp sent for me.” The office staff just laughed: a producer being polite to an actress backstage was not the same thing as summoning her for a high-level meeting.

  “In my country mind, that was what he had done!” Richardson said. “But it worked out. He put me in a play right away, Aishah Rahman’s Unfinished Women Cry in No Man’s Land While a Bird Dies in a Gilded Cage. Joseph Papp ended up as a great mentor to me.” Richardson was soon getting steady work at the Public—and when Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf had a national tour produced by the Public, Richardson was one of the seven women in the ensemble. (Shange called her play a “choreopoem”: it combined monologues with dancing.)

  Left by himself in New York City, Samuel L. Jackson spent six months working as a security guard in an apartment building in midtown Manhattan. “I didn’t have a gun,” Jackson said of his post. “I had a nightstick—which I really didn’t want either, because I didn’t want to pose a threat to anyone.” His job, as he saw it, was to be a reporter, not a hero. “If I saw something happening, I would call them on a walkie-talkie and tell them it was happening,” he said. “Or probably, wait until it was over and then tell them what had happened.”

  Jackson worked the night shift from eleven p.m. to seven a.m.; that left him time to go to auditions during the day and perform in the evening. He tried to approach his career like an air-traffic controller: at all times, he wanted to be performing in one play, rehearsing for another, and auditioning for the next one. Many of the plays paid a pittance—on the order of $50 for a four-week run, which barely covered subway tokens—but his priority was to keep acting. “If my résumé says showcase after showcase, at least I’m not waiting tables. But if I did one showcase a year and I wait tables every night, I’m a waiter, not an actor.”

  While Richardson’s rise seemed charmed, Jackson was still trying to suss out how to work the system. “I thought this was like every other job,” he admitted. “You start in the mailroom and then you get higher and higher. So I thought, ‘Okay, I’m doing theater, and eventually I’ll get a commercial, and then I’ll become a movie star.’” Unfortunately, he had no guidebook on how to make those things happen.

  “There’s always a time in any actor’s life where you wonder if you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing,” Jackson said. “You’re kind of doing some showcase somewhere and there’s no job on the horizon, and ConEd’s kind of beating at your door and you’re dodging that guy, and your outgoing phone service is gone, you can only receive calls. You’re waiting on the subway to pull in, so you can hear it come, so you jump the turnstile, and run down before the police see you. And you got seventy-five cents to go to Gray’s Papaya and make your meal that day.”

  When he went home to visit his mother, her friends would give him advice: “Why don’t you get on one of them soap operas?” they’d ask him. He refrained from telling them that he couldn’t just fill out an application.

  Fortunately, there was no shortage of plays to audition for. In 1965, writer Amiri Baraka founded the Black Arts Repertory Theater in Harlem: that’s regarded as the beginning of the Black Arts Movement (essentially, the cultural expression of the Black Power movement). While some historians say the movement ended circa 1975—in other words, just before Jackson and Richardson arrived in New York—the city still had plenty of active African American theater companies, most of them focusing on work by Black playwrights. To name a few: The New Heritage Repertory Theatre. The New Federal Theater. The New Lafayette Theater. It wasn’t a coincidence that so many had “New” in their name: they were wrestling with the racist traditions of American drama and trying to create a brand-new theatrical grammar.

  In the summer of 1979, Richardson joined the cast of Spell #7, a new choreopoem by Shange: the characters telling their stories here were Black artists in a bar. After a workshop production, Spell #7 debuted at the Public Theater with a cast that included Richardson (taking the role played by Shange herself in the workshop) and Avery Brooks (the actor later famous as Captain Sisko on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine). When a company in London wanted to do a production of Colored Girls, Shange asked Brooks to direct it, so Papp gave him two weeks off from Spell #7. Jackson came on as Brooks’s temporary replacement—but when Brooks stayed in London longer than expected, Papp fired him. That gave Jackson a much-needed job through the end of the run. br />
  One of the show’s dancers, Dyane Harvey-Salaam, had a duet with Brooks—she moved while he recited a poem—that she had to learn how to perform with a new partner, Jackson. “Sam’s rhythms were different,” she said. “Avery seemed to have a more urban interpretation of the language, whereas something about Sam’s tones and southern accent made me move differently. I kept trying to figure out how to work with this new interpretation and finally it dawned on me: you have to breathe with him, silly rabbit! You have to open yourself up and let yourself hear Sam’s inflections and Sam’s feelings. At first, Sam was struggling with the dance stuff—even then, he was large and he embodied the character.”

  The show began with what the cast called “the Mammy Dance”: a dance routine performed while wearing blackface masks with enormous red lips. Harvey-Salaam reflected, “Was the Mammy Dance the actual play that these actors did before they came to the bar? Possibly. Was it a dream? Possibly. Totally up for interpretation.” Trading in minstrel-show stereotypes a century after the Civil War ended was powerful—but upsetting for audiences and performers alike.

  Harvey-Salaam spent time in the Lincoln Center library, researching minstrelsy. “It was not only stereotypical mimicry, it was a form of a racism that was designed specifically to keep Black people controlled,” she concluded. “Once I understood that Black people were stereotyping the white people who were stereotyping the Black people, I was no longer as embarrassed or ashamed.”

  Young actors suffer all sorts of indignities starting out in their profession; actors of color, doubly so. But even knowing that, Samuel L. Jackson couldn’t have expected that so many of his acting jobs would require him to wear blackface: aside from the Mammy Dance, he appeared in minstrel garb in a public-television broadcast of the play The Trial of the Moke.