Friends: A Love Story (14 page)

I
n the summer of 1986 Ahren and I moved to New York together. We got an apartment in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn. There were mice running all up the house. Thank goodness Bottom was there, so they didn't come into our room. But every now and then a baby mouse would sneak in and Bottom would bat it around and play with it. Bottom weighed ninety pounds. We'd say, “Bottom, let the little mouse go!”

Bottom was still totally untrained. And it was his nature to howl when he heard sirens. He could hear a siren five miles away. But if your dog howls when you live in an apartment, they will put you out. So every time we heard a siren we grabbed his snout to keep him from opening his mouth. He became such a part of our rhythm we would wake up out of a dead sleep when we'd hear him starting to howl. I'd reach down onto the floor, grab his snout and keep him from opening his mouth until the noise went out of range and he'd go back to sleep.

The first summer we lived there we tried to get our relationship back to square one. We put one foot in front of the other. We lived off our savings. With the money I had earned from
Fences,
we knew we could go nine months out if we scraped our pennies together. Ahren got a temp job and was auditioning.
I also started auditioning right away. We were poor as could be, and that summer was hot as blazes! We were hot and miserable and scared and hopin' and prayin' and countin' pennies.

We still hadn't figured out our relationship. We probably should have been thinking about marriage. But neither of us knew how to talk about commitment, much less about marriage. That July I was offered a role in the movie
Hamburger Hill,
the story of one of the bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War. I was shocked. My agent promised, “This is going to launch you….” Ahren was gracious, as always. “I'm so happy for you, Courtney. It's going to be wonderful.” But beneath her kindness and love, the troubles in our relationship had not been fully mended.

Right before I left for the Philippines, where
Hamburger
was filmed, we learned that
Fences
would be heading to Broadway via San Francisco. Between these two roles, for me, it was confirmation that I'd made the right choice when I'd decided to turn down
Native Son
to return to school.

“Wow! You did the right thing, Court!” my parents affirmed.

“I knew what I wanted to do in my heart,” I told them. “I just got confused.”

 

I was in the Philippines for about two months. Being outside the country for the first time in my life was amazing. The first thing I noticed when I got off the plane was
whoosh!
—the humidity. The second was that every person who came up to me asked, “Are you Magic Johnson?” The country was a political hotbed. The United States had just decided to pull all of its troops off the bases where they had been stationed for years. Corazón Aquino was president and bombs seemed to be going off everywhere. The black people who lived there, who people called “negritos,” were physically very small in stature and treated worse than poor black folks in the States. It was very painful to see.

All of us in the
Hamburger
cast were unknowns: Don Cheadle, Dylan McDermott, myself…. They hardly paid us anything so they could spend the money elsewhere, like on blowing a lot of things up to make the movie seem realistic. One of the first days they started filming I was sitting with the director thinking out the next shot, when I heard a commotion. A man was down and they were performing CPR on him. We learned shortly that it was one of the electricians on the set. He had gotten electrocuted. He was dead before he hit the ground. We were all in a state of disbelief. This was supposed to be a movie—it was supposed to be fun. But after that I felt, “Can we go home now?” The cast and crew voted to stay. It was not pleasant. We were traumatized. On top of that, there were no trailers and it rained constantly, so the filming was grueling and uncomfortable. I made lifelong friends, but it wasn't a pleasant experience.

In the meantime Ahren and I were just trying to keep our relationship going. We wrote a lot of letters back and forth because we couldn't afford phone calls. In the back of my head I was wondering if Ahren and I would still be a couple when I got back.

Some of the guys were losing their natural minds with all the sex trade over there. You could just pick out a twelve-year-old and have sex with her—you could walk into a room and they had young girls lined up along the walls and up the stairs. I thought, “This is too much for me. I'm getting out of here. I'm not hangin' out and doin' a whole bunch of mess. I can't take this, it's too much for my spirit.” Some of the other guys said, “Oh, Courtney, come hang out and have some fun.” But I didn't care. I was on triple overload. I couldn't take anything that was painful to my spirit. I would come home, do my work, write in my journal and go to bed.

Boy, was I ever happy to get home! Ahren and I celebrated my return and had a wonderful Christmas. We had struggled, but we broke through to the other side. We'd been through
thick and thin and decided we were going to make a go of it. We thought, “This is going to work. We're going to make this work. How it's going to work, I don't know. But we're going to work on it.” Once again, we probably should have started talking about marriage but didn't.

I had a couple of weeks of downtime then began rehearsals for the pre-Broadway run of the play. Life was grand. I was on top of the world. Everything was new, but I still had the same types of personal issues. My father was a people pleaser, and now I had become one, too. And people liked me, so I could get away with things. I was prone to tell folks what they wanted to hear whether or not it was quite accurate. And even though my parents had taught me right from wrong, I wanted and needed attention and affirmation. I knew the business of entertainment was cutthroat. When no one was watching, whose morals were going to win out? I didn't have enough of my own moorings and moral center to maintain my integrity in the gray zones. I began to play the good boy, but when I thought I could, I'd try to get away with little stuff. I'd tell little white lies to people—I'd tell one person one thing and another person another. In my mind my intention was to fix it later. Until then, the ends justified the means. I still looked at myself as a good person. I was getting all these accolades, and I had people around me who believed in me, were confident and on my side, to lean on. People were amazed by my accomplishments. The experiences I was having were amazing! “Will you look at this boy—just graduated from Yale, got a film and about to go to Broadway!”

In retrospect, I find it very interesting that the same kinds of personality problems I was having were reflected in Bottom's behavior. Bottom was a really good dog at heart but had gotten big, was misbehaving and was generally out of control. Ahren couldn't handle him. I decided to hire a dog trainer.

“Tell the dog to come, Courtney,” the trainer told me.

“Come here, Bottom!” As usual, Bottom took a good five minutes to come to me. He looked at me; he walked around; he sniffed at this and that; he played little games.

“Oh, I've got it,” he said. “You've confused your dog. The dog is fine, I've gotta train you!”

“What do you mean?”

“You've got to tell the dog exactly what to do—how to please you. If you don't tell him how to please you, he doesn't know. He'll do what he wants to do.”

“Oh, wow…”

“Whatever side of the sidewalk you want Bottom to walk on, tell him that's his side. He'll gradually know that that's his side.”

I thought about what we'd been doing. Sometimes I'd tell Bottom what side I wanted him on and sometimes I wouldn't. No wonder he'd look at me like, “You didn't tell me that last night when it was dark and no one was looking out those big windows—you let me take a dump on those people's lawns then. Now when they're lookin', you want me at the curb? Hmmph!”

When he didn't do what I wanted, I'd call him to me and would spank him or hit him on the nose. But he was a very intelligent dog. The next time I'd call him he wouldn't come.

“Courtney, who wants to come when they know they're going to get a spanking?”

“Good point. No one, I guess.”

“Whenever your dog comes to you, it should feel like home. Good or bad, it's home. So praise him, then take him over to what he did and reprimand him. But do it with love so that your dog can't get enough of you.”

We rehearsed for
Fences
in New Haven then performed at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco. When we returned to New York there was major drama behind the scenes. August Wilson and the producer Carol Shorenstein Hays couldn't come to an agreement about how the play should end, and Lloyd was caught in the middle. Who has the power—the producer
because she has the money, the director because he's directing the thing, the playwright because he wrote it or the star, James Earl Jones, because he's onstage? Two days before we opened, Lloyd announced they had reached an impasse. Lloyd wasn't going against his playwright, so he was stepping down. We were not going to open. We all stood up and begged for a compromise but left that evening not knowing what was going to happen. We were called in the following day and August announced to the cast that he and Ms. Hays had come to an understanding about the ending of the play, Lloyd agreed to stage it, and the play opened. It was an instant hit!

In spite of the demands it placed on everyone,
Fences
became one of the biggest hits in Broadway history. The play opened March 27, 1987. In May it was nominated for six Tony Awards. In addition to doing the show, there was a monthful of luncheons, when the nominated actors and actresses got to meet the Tony Award voters. So my days were taken up and the shows were pressure-packed because the Tony voters were in the audience. I was stressed out wondering if I was good enough. There was too much personal pressure and life pressure. And to perform well, I can't eat too much. I lost about fifteen pounds—I almost wasted away. It was a grueling experience.

Now, all of a sudden I had to figure out how to maintain my energy for eight performances a week, night after night for ten straight months. I had two shows on Wednesdays, two on Saturdays, and Monday was my day off. Even though my training at Yale involved long days and many all-nighters, I hadn't worked as hard as I'd have to work in the play. It was exhausting! And nobody can tell you how to do it; you have to figure it out yourself. Plus, my role was very emotional. Every night Corey had to cry and mourn his father's death. Some nights I was as dry as a bone. But if I got my B.A. from Harvard and my M.F.A. from Yale,
Fences
earned me my Ph.D. I had to learn how
much energy to use—to expend the exact amount of energy I needed: no less, no more.

Fences
won every major award that year: Best Play, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Featured Actor, Best Featured Actress, Best Script, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, a bunch of other awards—everything. Frankie and I were both nominated for Best Featured Actor. It was great but the process was stressful. Frankie would ask me, “Gosh, Courtney, you're on top. What are you so worried about?” Unfortunately, Frankie and my votes canceled each other out. But I won the Clarence Derwent Award, which recognizes outstanding debuts in a Broadway play.

With all the attention, my immaturity became a bigger issue. Everyone was saying, “Oh, Courtney, you're so wonderful,” and I would believe them. People would recognize me as I took the subway back and forth to Brooklyn; they'd recognize me when I was on my bike. I wasn't seeking out the attention and I was out and about among the folk. That early–August Wilson era was the first time black folks had any reason to come see a play in a long time. I was new at dealing with my “celebrity quotient.”

“Didn't I run into you the other day? Oh, at
Fences!
You were in
Fences!
”

“Yeah, I'm in
Fences.
”

“Oh, maan!”

By August, I had hit my stride and onstage I knew how to give people their money's worth without overextending myself. My time management and emotional management were no longer major issues. That month also marked contract renegotiations, which occur five months into any Broadway play. We had to decide if we were going to re-up for another six months. I was excited because I thought it meant I'd be making more money; we were making the Broadway minimum, which Ahren and I were banking. In the meantime, the producer had made back her investment five months into the run (and about
thirteen million dollars overall). Now, the producer relies on the general manager to tell her how to deal with the actors. The general manager makes his money by keeping the show running tight in every area, including financially. James Earl earned a percentage and rightly so; he was the star. The GM told the rest of us, “There's no increase. Take it or leave it!” He knew there was no place else for black theater actors to go. Our understudies were talented and would be happy to take our places. I was outraged.

“Ahren, I want to leave the play. This is ridiculous!”