Friends: A Love Story (19 page)

 

Our family bent hard. We didn't break. But we sunk all the way down to the bottom of the well. After the funeral I stayed home for a month. The weeks after were a blur. Where's Daddy? Why did he do it? Was he mad? Was he mad at Mommy? What will I do without him? So many emotions were swirling within me I didn't know where to place them. I was mad. I was so upset. How could he do this to us? How could he do this to Mom? She is such an innocent person. All she does is love. All she wants to do is help. “Can I help? What can I do, Court? Let me help.” She's one of those kinds of people. That's where I get it from.

One of my most vivid memories of those days after Daddy's
death is of my mother trying to put a video in the VCR. My parents followed very traditional gender roles. Dad did the VCR. Mom wanted to watch a tape, but realized that she couldn't figure out how to work the machine. She broke down in tears and crumpled onto the ground.

“I don't even know how to work the VCR….”

“Oh, Mom…”

“Why would he do this? How could he do this to me?”

Seeing my mother broken like that was just devastating. She was at rock bottom. I had never seen her like that before.

My mother, sister and I came together during those painful weeks. We cried, we got angry, we laughed and remembered the good times. Everyone was very emotional and in a fit of misdirected rage, Cecilie and I almost came to blows.

“Cecilie, what are you going to do? I'm bigger than you now. You gonna hit me?”

We were entering the second stage of grieving: anger. Since Daddy wasn't around, we directed it at each other.

“Okay, now we're going to fight? You wanna fight? Oh, Lord…”

“What are you two doing?” my mother shouted. “You only have each other. Eventually, I won't be here. You'll be all you have left. You have to learn to get along!”

At that point we broke down and we all started sniffling and crying and hugging. It was a defining moment. No one wanted to fight. We were just hurt and lashing out. Together, we got in there together and dealt with our feelings. We've been tight ever since.

While we were home, Cec and I went down and cleaned out the basement. One part of us felt, “Let's get this stuff out of here,” because we were mad. Another part thought, “We're only going to be home for three weeks. We've got to do this before we go. We can't leave it for Mom.” My mother said, “Go ahead and do it. If something comes up you think he might have wanted me to keep, you let me know.”

We went through my dad's things together. He was so secretive, we wondered, “What are we going to find?” After knowing so little about my father's personal life, now to have to go through his belongings and to possibly learn what he thought—it was too much! I didn't want to know whatever we might find. I definitely didn't want to stumble across a suicide note. It was just too personal. These things were him; they were her. Fortunately, we didn't find anything like that. I did stumble across a letter my father had written to his foster father, describing the scenario when I had the presence of mind to go racing home when Cecilie's head had gotten caught between the jungle-gym bars. “I've never been prouder of my son than I was today,” the note said. It filled my heart to know that that was a defining moment for him. But most of what Daddy had was on his computer, which was so intricately password protected, it was locked up. We never really got in there.

We did discover one thing that broke our hearts. Daddy had ten credit cards that were charged up to the max. He'd been pulling from this one to pay that one. He was financially out of control. He couldn't handle it by himself; however, the last thing he did was pay off my ten-thousand-dollar Harvard student loan. When I saw that, I broke down. That action captured the essence of who he was. Personally, he was lost and didn't know how to ask for help; yet he was thinking about helping me. Ahren came out to Detroit about three weeks into my stay. We were cleaning up in the basement.

“This is it for us, isn't it, Court?”

“What?”

“This is it. This is the end, isn't it?”

“What are you talking about? What are you saying? Where did that come from?” I started thinking about what lies I might have told. Who had she spoken to? What might she have found out?

Ahren didn't say anything else. But the writing was on the wall. She knew this was going to totally unmoor me; that I
would never be the same; that
we
would never be the same. She knew I was going to run.

In between all this I would practice my lines to myself. I had to keep the show in the back of my mind. I had to keep my rhythms going—every now and then say the words, just to keep the rhythms in my body.

Right before Cec and I left Detroit to return to our respective lives, our mother made us make a promise to her and each other.

“I want the whole family to go to therapy.”

I didn't know anything about therapy except that until this point I had resisted it. I didn't know how to deal with this. I felt like my head was going to explode. I knew I desperately needed help. I thought, “I don't know about you, but I
gotta
see somebody. I'm definitely losing my mind!”

I packed some stuff up into a little U-Haul I rented and drove home alone. I listened to Oleta Adams's “Get Here” and Bonnie Raitt's “I Can't Make You Love Me,” which was like Ahren crying out to me.

I wept all the way back to New York. Somehow, I had known that my dad needed me. I felt that somehow he had been calling out to someone his whole life. Somehow I knew that but could never find a way to bridge the gap while I was home. I was always escaping back to school, escaping back to my life in New York and leaving him to his demons. It was a very long drive back East.

I was destroyed. And even though I was returning to my home, I didn't know what I was heading into. Things wouldn't be the same.

N
ow that I was “Tina Turner,” I had thirty days to get in shape, learn the movements, work my behind off. I was a regular person—I wasn't fit, I didn't go to the gym. Since Tina is known for having this incredible body, and dancing is cardiovascular, I decided I'd better get a trainer. I'd get up at about 5:00 a.m. and go work out for two hours. He put me on a diet of chicken, broccoli or string beans and white potatoes—chicken for protein, green beans for carbohydrates, white potatoes for energy. And I drank a lot of black coffee for the caffeine, and water. Every now and then he'd make me some ol' tofu cheese-cake or something for a little sweetness, though it wasn't as sweet as we know it. I didn't have time to go to a restaurant and order, so every week or so I'd cook in bulk. I'd get twenty potatoes, twenty-five chicken breasts and a bunch of green beans. Each day I'd put some in a container, maybe I could heat it up, then stand up and eat. Michael Peters would tell me to sit down and eat, but I couldn't. I only had a certain amount of time and there was so much I needed to cram into my brain, into my body, into my feet. I felt like I was under the gun.

After my morning workout we danced for about twelve hours a day. Michael had a spirit of excellence and an incredible
work dynamic. We didn't know it at the time, but he also had AIDS; he didn't have a lot of energy. He would lie on the couch napping while his assistant, Eartha Robinson, and I would work in the studio. Eartha and I would watch Tina's videotapes together and do the exact thing. I had to learn all the steps to all the songs, every nuance, every movement of Tina's. She didn't sit on a stool and she didn't dance easy. It was all very, very physical. I had to learn complete routines so they could be filmed straight through from beginning to end, from top to bottom, nonstop. It wasn't like how we shoot movies—in portions—or how you hear singers sing one line and get that right, then sing another, and the producers put it all together at the end. You had to have stamina. You had to know the routine. You had to make it believable in five-inch stilettos. So Eartha and I would work, then at the end of the evening we'd wait for Michael to get up, then we'd show him what we had accomplished. Eartha was the nurturer, Michael would crack the whip. “This isn't right, that isn't right, tweak this, tweak that. Put on those heels and do it.” He worked me. I went, I danced, I stood, I ate a little something, I danced some more. Somehow I got through it. Needless to say, my body was
achin'!
Absolutely everything hurt—
ooh-aah-eee-aah
hurt! The more I danced, the more my body shrank. Every week I'd go to a costume fitting and every week they'd take in another inch.

While I was learning the dances, I also had to learn my lines and get the dialect right. I was trying to approximate her dramatic style of speaking, as well as that particular sound of hers—the “ah's” she spoke, being from the South but living in Europe. I also had to develop the character. Who was this woman? And how could I portray her in a way that you'd believe it and be touched by the power of her accomplishments? I read everything I could about Tina and Ike. I examined the personality of one and then the other. I tried to read between the lines of her biography, tried to put myself in
each situation and figure out what my choices would be. I tried to imagine what their interpersonal dynamics were. When it came to experiencing abuse, I couldn't draw much upon personal experience, but I did know what it was like to have allowed myself to be convinced by a man that his way is the right way. I did know what it was like to let a man convince me to stay longer than I really wanted to. I did know what it was like to do something and say afterward, “Why wasn't I strong enough to say no?” Or, “Why didn't I chance to hurt his feelings? Because I felt in my soul—I knew in my spirit, to my core—that it wasn't good for me.”

Many times we stand on the outside of another person's life, looking in, judging them. We ask ourselves, Now, why would they allow that? Why would they let someone treat them badly? We think, It doesn't make any sense. The abuse is consistent and it continues. Why can't she say “enough is enough”? I think I have a particular capacity for mercy—for feeling, for relating to, for empathizing with others—especially those who are sad, going through it, put upon, subjugated or oppressed, whether by their own choosing or by someone else's. I don't think that experiencing such circumstances makes a person less worthy of love, compassion, care, sympathy or aid. I had heard talk of my mother going through it that time with Teddy Slaughter. That was just a week, just one occurrence. Still, I could imagine what it must be like when you have no money and someone else controls the purse strings. When you really feel that you're at the mercy of another person for food, shelter and clothing, when you receive the basic human necessities through them. You must feel very vulnerable. You might believe you have to stay there. Or maybe you believe no one else would want you—you let the question “Who would want you?” sink in. I was certain that question could damage a woman if she bought into it, if she believed any part of it. If she didn't believe, for instance, in the Bible verse “If God be for you, who can be
against you?” That would play into her fear, which is a very powerful emotion.

At the same time I knew from my own experience of being encouraged by great film and theater personalities that those who have gone through the fire can inspire the rest of us. People can come out stronger on the other end. Or perhaps they just barely come through it, but if they regain their strength or choose not to perpetuate that kind of behavior, they can infuse the rest of us with their spirit. I knew Tina's story had that power and I wanted to make the audience feel it.

 

Once we started filming, we worked for seventeen to eighteen hours each day. According to my union contract, I was supposed to get twelve hours off between tapings. But it was nothing to have eight, maybe ten, hours before I had to be back on the set. I was asked to waive my twelve-hour turnaround about thirty-five times in fifty-three days. They asked and because there was so much to do, I couldn't say no; the movie had to be made in three months so its release would coincide with Tina's world tour. Most movies don't go from principal photography to on-screen in front of a paying audience that quickly and look like anything of substance. It just doesn't happen.

In spite of these challenging working conditions, making
What's Love Got to Do With It?
was an incredible experience. One amazing scene took place immediately after Laurence, as Ike, disrespected me and called me sorry, backstage, immediately before a concert.

“I'm sorry, Ike.”

“Yeah, you sorry.”

Now we stood onstage about to perform in front of all the extras who were playing the concert audience. I was looking out at them. Laurence was behind me, standing in front of the band, his back to the audience. Suddenly I sensed him at my side. At this point we were totally unscripted and in the
moment I turned and looked at him. I was in the emotional place where he just told me I was the sorriest bitch he'd ever known. I thought he was going to say something like, “Sing. Don't you embarrass me.” But he, as an actor, made the opposite choice and he did something really sweet and tender—he kissed me on the cheek. At that point something just surged through me. One tear flowed down my cheek. Right at that point the music came on and she sang that primal
“Ohhhhh, there's somethin' on my mind….”
You couldn't have planned or scripted that. The acting, the sound and the music and the lights were all perfect in that moment. That became one of my favorite scenes. We did it in one take, and that photo of us with that one tear rolling down my cheek eventually became part of the poster for the movie.

But few scenes happened that easily. I remember filming the scene where Ike dragged Tina to the bedroom and the little baby boy watches him beating his mama. That day, I cried—I screamed—at the top of my lungs for seventeen straight hours. I thought my head would burst open from the pain. We performed “Proud Mary” so many times I lost count. Each time we'd finish, the director would say, “Let's do it again.” There were four or five cameras, each filming from different angles, yet we had to do it over and over. That was the one time I spoke out. From the outside looking in, the dance looked easy. But when you're dancing and singing in five-inch heels, you feel like you've caught a wool sweater in the back of your throat. You can't breathe or swallow. Your feet ache. You're sore at the top of your sternum. It wasn't that simple to just do it over and over again.

“Can an actor have a moment? Can we take one minute—just sixty seconds—to rest?” The production schedule was so tight that I literally meant one minute.

Another time during a bathroom break, I plopped down on the toilet and started doing my business but noticed there was
no sound of pee meeting the water in the toilet. Why is this taking so long? I wondered. Then I realized that I, a grown woman, had forgotten to pull my underwear down. I was that fried in the brain. “Isn't that funny! I haven't done this since I was a toddler.” I got up, threw my panties in the trash, went out and filmed the scene again. Our last day on the set was twenty-five hours long. We were filming the argument in the limo when Tina finally strikes back physically.

While all this was going on, my friends were telling me, “Oh, no, that's too much! You should go to your trailer and not come out until such-and-such a thing has been handled.” I didn't have time for all that. I didn't have time to be upset, to play those games. This was a war and I wanted to win it. Little slings, arrows, hurt feelings—the trivialities—weren't very important. For once, I saw the finish line—my dream: a starring role in a major motion picture. I had to make it. I couldn't stumble with personal hurts, aches, pains, tears and frailties. This was going to be on celluloid and last forever. I was trying to do good work. I was trying to be somebody. There was no way I was going to stumble.

 

I survived filming
What's Love
on fear. I was afraid that I would fail, afraid the movie wouldn't turn out well, afraid I wouldn't be believable, afraid I wouldn't do Ms. Turner's story justice, afraid I wouldn't have what it took to accomplish the job, afraid I might not have the strength and energy to finish. I was afraid that if the movie lacked in any way, it would in some measure—large or small—be my fault. The fact that movies are filmed out of sequence made me question myself even more. When you make a movie, you film every scene that happens in one location, then you tear that location down, leave and move to the next set. It doesn't matter if it happens at the beginning, the middle or the end of the movie; if it happens at that location it's going to get shot while you're there. You do a scene, cut and move on to the next one. But since you're not performing se
quentially, in an emotionally explosive movie it's especially hard to chart where you are. Each scene has to fit with the scene that came before, which you may have filmed days or even weeks earlier or may not have filmed yet at all. I wondered, Is it going to flow when we put it all together?

But rather than collapsing under the weight of my fear, I tried to work it to my advantage. I would constantly self-talk to motivate myself. I'd look into the mirror and give myself a talking-to like a parent or girlfriend would. Sometimes I would be gentle and kind; other times I would be rough with myself. I might not have been able to take tough talk from somebody else unless they softened it with love. But I knew I loved myself, so I could tell myself whatever I had to.

“I can't do this,” one part of me would cry.

Then the strong part would answer, “What are you going to do—quit?”

“I really want to…”

“You know you're not going to do that. You are going to
do
it.”

“But I can't—I don't know if I can do it. What if I'm not good enough? What if I mess everything up?”

“You tried out and you got the job. You got it fair and square. You got it on your own merit, so hush.”

“But it's just too much…”

“Yes, it's hard—and it ain't as hard now as it's going to get. But this is the hardest thing you will ever have to do, Angela. The next time you do something this hard you'll be birthing a child. Just think—anything you do from this point on will be easy. It will be a breeze.”

“But I'm so tired…”

“So what do you want to do now—sit down?”

“I just need some time to rest.”

“Well, I'll tell you what—you've got five minutes, ten minutes. Why don't you sit down for ten minutes, then get up and hit it again.”

Or when my throat would tighten and my eyes would brim with tears, “What do you want to do—cry? That's not going to do anything, but if it makes you feel better, go ahead and have a good cry. Then after ten minutes, get up and let's get started again. Is that all right by you?”

“Okay.”

In addition to my self-doubt, I also had to fend off the naysayers. Few black women had had the opportunity to star in a major motion picture before, and their roles were not this visible or of this magnitude. A lot of people worried that I wasn't the woman for the job. I'd hear that folks were whispering, “Well, they got what they got, she ain't no dancer.” Others couldn't imagine I'd do justice to this larger-than-life person with whom so many people had had wonderful entertainment experiences. I wondered whether an inadequate portrayal of her might cause her to lose this higher-than-life status in people's imaginations and hearts. I worried that my performance might not satisfy. How could you possibly capture her life and put it on film? How can you capture lightning and put it in a bottle?