Bad Motherfucker Read online

  When Jackson joined the cast of Spell #7, he was thirty years old. “The American ideal is that everyone wants to make their first million dollars by the time they’re thirty,” Jackson said. “When I was thirty, I was in New York doing off-Broadway plays, maybe one TV job a year and a small part in a movie, thinking I should have been discovered by then.” And if he had somehow gotten that million dollars? “One of my plans was to take all my friends to Brazil, and we’d lay on a beach with a kilo of coke and have all the fun we could possibly have and then go back to work.”

  If Jackson was performing in a play at night and had time to kill during the day, he would head to Times Square—the diseased heart of 1970s New York City, still many years away from being a gleaming center of international commerce. Jackson fondly remembered the “no-man’s-land part of Times Square, with transvestite hookers and kung fu movie theaters.” He knew at least four theaters where for the price of one ticket, he could see a triple bill of Hong Kong martial arts movies like Five Deadly Venoms, One-Armed Swordsman, and Master of the Flying Guillotine. “I would go to Times Square at eleven in the morning, buy a quart of beer, a nickel bag of weed, and see three movies for a dollar until it was time to go to the theater.”

  Many of Jackson’s friends were also Black actors trying to make it in New York City—some of them future stars like Denzel Washington, Laurence Fishburne, Morgan Freeman, Wesley Snipes, and Alfre Woodard, some of them talented people who never broke through—taking any acting job available. “We worked off-Broadway, off-off-Broadway, nowhere near Broadway,” Washington said. Jackson and Washington costarred in one production, The Mighty Gents, about the aging members of a gang in Newark; the show had a truck tour in all five boroughs of New York City, making impromptu stages on basketball courts and in public parks.

  “We rode the train together, we walked from audition to audition, we went to each other’s plays, we were an interactive community,” Jackson said. When money was tight, which it almost always was, they would end up at the unemployment office together, which they nicknamed Club 25—or would pool their money for communal dinners so that nobody went hungry.

  Sometimes there would be a casting call for a Black role that would seem to bring in every actor in town, Jackson remembered: “Everybody from age twenty to age fifty was called because they had no idea what kind of Black person they wanted for the role. That kind of let you know that they didn’t have a clue as to who these people are.” Conversely, if Jackson was auditioning for a role that he knew he wasn’t going to get but that seemed tailor-made for the talents of a friend, he made sure to call that friend and let him know there was a job he’d be perfect for.

  Jackson and Richardson had been together for most of a decade when she let him know that it was time to get married. More precisely, she told him that her grandfather’s health was failing, and that before he died, he wanted to make sure that he got to walk her, the last of his grandchildren, down the aisle. She instructed Jackson, “You have to ask him if you may marry me. And then you have to ask me, will I marry you.” They were wed on August 18, 1980. As Richardson saw her options, she could marry a rich boy or a smart boy: “I married the smart boy.” (After their wedding, her chosen name for most of her professional credits remained LaTanya Richardson.)

  The following year, the couple bought a four-story brownstone in Harlem, at 522 W. 143rd Street (on a block between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue), paying $35,000. Jackson did much of the renovation himself, putting in many hours stripping the paint off walls and repainting them.

  Waiting for paint to dry was a good exercise in patience, which proved necessary with Jackson’s career—his star was rising, but very slowly. He booked his first role in a studio movie, Ragtime, directed by Milos Forman (most famous for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest). His character had a number, not a name (“Gang Member No. 2”), but the production bought him a plane ticket to London to shoot his scenes: Jackson’s first time in Europe. “That was a big, big experience, figuring out that the world wasn’t what I thought it was,” Jackson said. He had thought of Great Britain as monolithically white, and was amazed to discover the West Indian culture it contained. And the movie’s cast included James Cagney, in his last movie role: Jackson used to have lunch with him every day, listening to stories of old Hollywood. “Stars don’t come bigger, yet he would hang out and talk with us,” an impressed Jackson said.

  Jackson appeared at the Public Theater in an adaptation of Brecht’s play Mother Courage, with a script by Shange, understudying Morgan Freeman, eleven years his senior, learning from the veteran actor onstage and off. After warning Jackson that he wouldn’t be missing any performances, Freeman told him, “I don’t know why you’re working so hard, boy. You got it. Just don’t quit.” Jackson didn’t, mounting up credits in town and at regional theaters: Ohio Tip-Off, at Baltimore Center Stage, was set in the locker room of a minor-league basketball team. District Line, at the Negro Ensemble Company (in New York), was about a group of taxicab drivers waiting for fares. The New York Times praised Jackson as “vibrant” in the role of “a fast-talking jive artist who wittily defends robbery as a form of sophisticated protest against economic injustice.”

  Jackson’s longest-running stage production, however, was A Soldier’s Play by Charles Fuller, which ran at the Negro Ensemble Company from November 1981 to January 1983, and then spent another year on a nationwide tour. The play, a murder mystery set at a Louisiana Army base in 1944, when the armed forces were still segregated, was a powerful examination of racism and how it festers. The cast of twelve men comprised nine Black actors, including Denzel Washington, and three white actors: one of the white performers, Steve Zeller, stumbled into his audition because the Negro Ensemble Company had its offices in the same building as the Actors Equity offices. “My agent said don’t do it: You’re going to be cast as a racist forever if you do this part,” Zeller remembered. But he took the part, both because he thought it was a powerful play and because he needed the $350 a week.

  “Sam is one of the brightest people I’ve ever run into,” Zeller said. “Nothing got past him.” Jackson played Private Louis Henson, whose dialogue whipsaws from crude jokes (“Cobb, the kinda women you find, it’s a wonda your nuts ain’t fell off—crabs? You probably got lice, ticks, bedbugs, fleas—tapeworms—”) to bleak acknowledgments of American racism (“I just hope we get lucky enough to get shipped outta this hellhole to the War!”).

  Over a thousand performances, the cast fell into habits. Before shows, they’d play Trivial Pursuit in the dressing room and watch Family Feud. It emerged that Jackson and Zeller were the cast’s biggest practical jokers. To look sweaty for a scene where the characters were supposed to have come directly from a baseball game, the actors would spray themselves with mist bottles offstage—unless Jackson and Zeller ambushed them with water pistols first.

  The play won the Pulitzer and the cast was honored by backstage visits from the likes of Sidney Poitier and Peter O’Toole and Diana Ross, but what Zeller particularly remembered about those years was witnessing the racism his fellow actors faced offstage. After shows in New York, Zeller got in the habit of hailing taxis—otherwise they wouldn’t stop for the Black members of the cast. When the show arrived in Seattle for a monthlong stand, Zeller rented a furnished apartment that seemed nicer than the hotel where the cast had been booked—but when Black actors went to the same building, they were turned away.

  One visitor who talked his way backstage at the Theater Four on West 55th Street was a film student at NYU. He introduced himself to Jackson as a fellow Morehouse alumnus, and told Jackson he was going to be a filmmaker—and that when he started to make movies, he would love for Jackson to be in them. “I had my dream and he had his,” Jackson said with a shrug. And while both dreams seemed destined to run up against “a surplus of reality,” Jackson nevertheless remembered the young man’s name: Spike Lee.

  While A Soldier’s Play was still on tour, Norman Jewison directed t
he film version—called A Soldier’s Story. Jewison used only a few essential members of the original cast; the scuttlebutt among the actors was that the theatrical producers, not wanting to recast the stage production, discouraged him from hiring the whole ensemble. When A Soldier’s Story was released, Adolph Caesar’s work earned him an Oscar nomination; Denzel Washington’s performance turned him into a movie star.

  During the run of A Soldier’s Play, Jackson and Richardson had a baby: Zoe Jackson, born on March 28, 1982. “The first few years of Zoe’s life, one of us always had to not work so that somebody could be at home with her,” Jackson said: with his extended run in A Soldier’s Story, that was mostly Richardson for quite a while.

  When Richardson realized she was effectively putting her career on hold in favor of Jackson’s, and they weren’t going to be the Black Taylor and Burton anytime soon, she said, “I cried like a banshee.” But, she said, “I had to deal with my feelings. I wasn’t going to be good with just nannies raising Zoe.” Her mantra: “We’d vowed to be a revolutionary Black family.” That was a double-edged phrase: it meant both that they came from a background of revolutionary politics and that not breaking their family up could be a revolutionary act in itself.

  That stood in stark contrast to Jackson’s own childhood: his father, Roy Jackson, had visited him once, when he was still an infant, and then abandoned his mother, Elizabeth. Roy’s mother, however, had always stayed in touch with her grandson Sam, sending him birthday cards and Christmas cards, even though they had never met. So in late 1982, when his own daughter Zoe was about six months old, not even walking yet, Jackson decided it was time to meet his paternal grandmother. The national tour of A Soldier’s Play had reached Topeka, Kansas, and she lived about an hour away, in Kansas City, Kansas.

  When Samuel Jackson arrived at his grandmother’s house, much to his surprise, Roy Jackson was also there: for the first time in his life, he had a conversation with his father. After a little while, Roy told Samuel, “I want to show you something. I want you to meet your sister.”

  Samuel objected—he was an only child. Roy told him that wasn’t actually true: he had brothers and sisters in Philadelphia, among other places. But there was one particular sibling he wanted Samuel to meet.

  “So we go to his house, maybe four blocks from my grandmother’s house,” Samuel said. “There’s an elderly lady, a middle-aged lady, and a teenager there. And I’m thinking, Well, maybe the teenager. And then the teenager goes upstairs and comes down with a baby, who’s younger than my daughter—that’s my sister.”

  Whatever reaction Roy hoped for was not the reaction he got from his son: “Are you fucking out of your mind? What the fuck is wrong with you? Why are you still out here making babies?”

  Roy told Samuel, “You can’t talk to me that way. I’m your father.”

  Thirty-three years after their last visit, Samuel wasn’t having any of it: “We’re just two guys talking. We can’t go to this father-son space.”

  The elderly lady asked Samuel how long it had been since he had seen his father: were they close?

  He told her the truth: “This is only the second time I’ve seen this motherfucker in my life.”

  The elderly woman stared at her daughter, the middle-aged woman—who in turn stared at her daughter, the teenager, who looked about sixteen years old. The teenager just hung her head. Jackson felt sorry for all of them.

  The capper: “And then when we leave, he wants to be pissed with me because I didn’t lie for him!”

  That was the last time they ever spoke. Six years later, Jackson got a call from a hospital in Kansas; Roy, an alcoholic, was dying from cirrhosis. “Your father is gravely ill,” they said. “And we want to know if you want us to take drastic action to keep him alive.”

  He asked, “Are you calling to ask if I want you to put him on life support, or are you calling to see if I’m going to be responsible for his medical bill?” When they hemmed and hawed, Jackson told them, “He’s got a sister in Kansas City—you should call her.” And he hung up the phone. “I’m not going to make that decision,” Jackson said. “I wasn’t trying to be cold, but he wasn’t my responsibility.”

  Even temporarily retired from the stage, Richardson retained a gift for drama, both as an art form and as an approach to personal dynamics. She bluntly informed her husband that his acting was bloodless. “You’re smart,” she told him. “You know the right facial expression. You know the vocal inflection. You know everything to do except how to feel it.” Understandably stung, Jackson told her that she had no filter—but as time went on, he conceded that she was right. “I was always watching people react to me rather than my being inside the character,” he said. He was gifted enough to fool audiences, and even to fool himself, but the performances were all happening on the exterior of his soul.

  More encouragingly, when Jackson felt like he was getting typecast as a heavy, Richardson reminded him that some great actors, like James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, had begun their career with a steady diet of bad guys. That made it easier for him to accept small roles on programs like Spenser: For Hire (the detective show starring Robert Urich and Avery Brooks). “Every year I went up to Boston to get beat up by Spenser and Hawk,” Jackson said.

  Jackson also got steady work in TV, if not on TV: for two and a half years, he served as Bill Cosby’s stand-in on The Cosby Show. On Monday mornings, Jackson, along with the stand-ins for the rest of the cast, would watch America’s favorite TV family rehearse the show, taking notes on the blocking and any other movements on the set. Then for the next two days, the stand-ins would walk through the episode, scripts in hand, so that the crew could make sure all the technical elements were working smoothly. “We were the junior Huxtables,” he joked.

  “I wore Bill’s clothes over my clothes, because he’s larger than I am, so that the lights would be correct and they could get that color palette down,” Jackson said. “You learn how to work with three to four cameras. When they move them, and where to look, how to move. So I told myself I was learning how to do three-camera television.”

  Jackson honed his impression of Cosby and delivered his line readings of parental wisdom for the benefit of the stagehands, but he never tried to schmooze the star or jawbone his way into a guest spot. “I didn’t impose myself on them,” Jackson said. “I didn’t want to be on the show, so I never tried that.” (It’s totally reasonable to have career aspirations other than appearing on The Cosby Show, but it seems odd, even self-defeating, to treat a job as a two-and-a-half-year seminar on the techniques of sitcom acting, and then not try to put the lessons into action.) The only time he ever appeared on camera for The Cosby Show was when the crew needed to film an exterior shot of some passersby on the sidewalk outside the Huxtables’ home in Brooklyn Heights: metaphorically and literally, Jackson stayed outside.

  While Jackson was wearing the sweaters of the stars, many of his friends had moved on to actual fame. Morgan Freeman was making movies; Denzel Washington joined the cast of St. Elsewhere. Alfre Woodard was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in the 1983 movie Cross Creek. “The opportunities were there,” Jackson said. “But I was never prepared, because I was a little bit off, you know?” He told himself that his time would come, since it had for so many people he knew.

  Jackson’s pal Albert Cooper was visiting New York when Jackson booked an appearance in the Eddie Murphy comedy Coming to America, as a stickup man robbing a fast-food restaurant. “When Sam got that part where he played the guy with the shotgun, I was staying with him,” Cooper said. “That was a day’s worth of work—we were so excited about that. Sam got a day’s worth of work!”

  Another important day of work came in the summer of 1987 when Spike Lee followed through on his promise from years earlier and cast Jackson in his second feature film, School Daze. The movie was set at a thinly disguised version of Morehouse; in Jackson’s scene, shot on the very first day of filming, he played Leeds, a belligerent local who has
sles some students. Acting in the scene with him were friends of Jackson from various points of his life, including Cooper, Bill Nunn, and Laurence Fishburne. It was a trip back in time: not only was Jackson returning to Atlanta to make a movie, he was playing the role of a block boy once again. The performance unlocked some of his old resentments about the high-handed attitude of Morehouse men, and he was protective of the character. Years later, when a radio interviewer referred to the character as a “hostile townie,” Jackson bristled: it was a replay of Morehouse students dismissing their neighbors in the projects as an undesirable class of people, rather than individuals. “He had a name,” Jackson interrupted. “L-E-E-D-S. Leeds.”

  Fishburne was the lead in School Daze, while Jackson was a day player. Fish was an old friend, so Jackson swallowed any resentment he felt at the respective arcs of their careers. But that detachment proved harder to sustain with another project later that year: The Piano Lesson, a play by August Wilson set in 1936 Pittsburgh (the fourth play in his ten-play sequence The Pittsburgh Cycle, about the African American experience, with each play representing a different decade in the twentieth century). Wilson had written the leading role of Boy Willie, who wants to sell his family’s heirloom piano so he can buy the land where his ancestors were sharecroppers, specifically for Charles S. Dutton, who had won a Tony nomination for his work in an earlier Wilson play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. But Dutton had committed to shoot the movie Crocodile Dundee II, so there was an unusual compromise, to let the actor have both commerce and art: Jackson would play the role in the initial out-of-town production (at the Yale Rep theater in New Haven, Connecticut) but when The Piano Lesson moved to Broadway in early 1988, Dutton would take over the role and Jackson would serve as his understudy.