Life Beyond Measure (14 page)

Doubt itself is one of the most difficult responses to fight. Doubt is inside you—and it isn’t something that accidentally finds itself inside you. It is there because the component elements of it are there; and they congeal in a way, triggered by external forces, by social mores, by economic conditions, by family responsibilities, or by accidental occurrences. And once they congeal, you’re looking at self-doubt. You don’t have to look far to know that it’s you that you’re doubting: “Do I have what it takes? Why did I fail there? How come I haven’t been able to get this job?”

Yes, fear, doubt, and desperation are very real forces. And there is nothing you can do about them except to stand up to them. And if they push you to your knees and you can’t fight back enough to stand up, they’ve got you, at least for the moment. But you will mark that and learn from it. And when you escape, when you fight back, when you subdue or overwhelm them, that’s a mark for you, and that mark strengthens.

Would I love to tell you that I have vanquished fear from life? Yes, as much as I would love to keep you far from it. Unfortunately,
it’s a battle, and mine has left me with checkered results. You see, Ayele, it is in facing the smallest fears, the fears that are somewhat short of self-destruction, that we make most of our compromises. Because if it is less important, we make a compromise rather than saying, “It’s OK to resist. I shouldn’t compromise on the basis of it not being that important. I should face it, because it is the correct thing to do.”

Now, as to you, Ayele, and the reality of your life, which I pray will be long, productive, and useful, with an appreciable amount of joy and pleasure—I don’t expect that you will escape battling fear, doubt, and desperation any more than I have. You will prevail, however, I am doubly certain, because you come from a long line of individuals—like Reggie and Evelyn Poitier—who have stood against their fears in the worst of deluges and triumphed over them. You will be strong; that I predict.

Remember that the more times fear wins, the more vulnerable you will be. The big difference will be up to your judgment as to when and where, and on which issue, you choose to stand your ground against each fear.

Standing your ground will have to be done many times. Sometimes you will win, and sometimes you won’t. The outcome all depends upon the nature of it—the fear—and the nature of you, the individual.

I’m closing for now. When I write again, I’ll have more stories to relate about different responses to fear and other instigators of our closest calls—some that worked, and those that didn’t.

I
n my early years, Ayele, I had no knowledge of the horrendous extremes that give the word
addiction
its terrifying meanings.

But I am writing to you now to recall the various ways I saw it in action before I knew its name. There it was, every day, repeating itself, deepening its ties with those already in its grasp; and seducing any and all observers who seemed most likely to believe that a smoker is simply a smoker, no more, no less; a gambler, a gambler; a drinker, a drinker. That each person, in his or her own way, is searching for pleasures of a harmless nature—pleasures that suit his or her particular needs.

In that era, long before words like
addiction
and
science
had reached my ear, addiction was under scientific scrutiny. Even to this very day,
in late 2007, medical experts, through science, are looking inside the human brain to see how and why both chemical and nonchemical addiction alter the perceptions and behavior of human beings.

Confronted with similar problems long ago, I had to deal with them on my own. Mama Gina, my grandmother on my mother’s side, smoked a white clay pipe. I had no reason to wonder why. My auntie ’Gusta, my mother’s sister, smoked a pipe as well. Later, as a teenager I, incorrectly, assumed that such an activity was a habitual carryover from the African culture of their forefathers long before the slave traders arrived with their schemes of evil. Still, my mother never smoked. My father and our village elders had a taste for rum, but never in excess.

I smoked my first cigarette when I was seventeen and in the army, having hiked my age, as I have said, to get in. I saw my fellow soldiers smoking, all of them eighteen or older, and I thought it would be a cool way to give the impression that I was one of the guys. I didn’t take to it well at first, but after a while smoking became such an addiction that I arrived at two packs a day, then tried to back off but couldn’t kick it.

After I began smoking, I started drinking casually, socially—but drinking nevertheless. For a shy guy like me, that eased the tension in social gatherings whenever I would have otherwise been more comfortable in the corner, just observing. A drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other—well, it was part of the environment, the ambience of the clubs and parties of the Harlem social world that I was trying to fit into. Soon enough, drinking snuck up on me as well, and turned into a habit. And habits, as we all now know, can slip, unnoticed, into addictions.

Gambling was my last acquired addiction. Such an activity was unimaginable in my youth. First, I never had money with which
to gamble. I had never heard of dice or cards or Las Vegas. As a kid, the only thing I saw relative to gambling was grown men playing dominoes and checkers. I had no interest in either one. But years later in New York City, I somehow developed an interest in cards, dice, and horse racing. Gradually, over time, while still a young man I became addicted.

It started with me playing pinochle with a few friends I had gotten to know. From pinochle, I gravitated to poker, and from poker to blackjack. And then I got started playing the numbers. Gambling, you see, was a huge activity in New York City.

I later added horse racing to my list of dangerous indulgences. By the time I started earning money as a young actor, I was already a veteran gambler.

Early on, I could have gotten into substantial trouble had it not been for a notable Harlem figure named Bumpy Johnson. He was very well known, and had considerable influence. He was a numbers guy and was perceived as an underworld character in Harlem, having recently returned from prison, where he had spent several years for challenging (it was rumored) the Mafia’s dominance in the region’s underworld activities.

When he came out of prison, Bumpy went into business, creating heavy detergents for cleaning and scrubbing and selling them to local business establishments. At the time, my acting career was starting to move and I was out of the leaner stretches, but work was still intermittent enough that to supplement my income, I had partnered with a friend, Johnny Newton, in a restaurant called Ribs in the Ruff. That was the context in which I got to know Bumpy—when we started buying products from him. He would pop by now and then, and was always kind, personable, and interested in the success of our place.

From time to time, we’d also run into Bumpy at the Theresa Hotel, where my partner Johnny was once manager of the hotel’s bar—which was then among Harlem’s most popular watering holes. There was a familiar crowd there who knew me and knew that whenever I was flush from an acting job, I’d be looking to play some poker. I happened to be at the bar one afternoon, talking to Johnny, when I noticed that Bumpy was there as well, holding court with a group of his cronies. I’d planned on going over to say hello, but before I could, Bumpy rose from his chair and made his way toward the exit, nodding in my direction and explaining that he had to meet someone at Small’s Paradise, another of Harlem’s chic establishments, located about ten blocks away.

Fifteen minutes later, while I was still talking to Johnny, a phone call came in for me. When I picked up the receiver, I recognized the voice of Bumpy Johnson as he asked me to take a cab over to where he was, because, as he put it, “I want to talk to you.”

He was sitting alone when I arrived at Small’s Paradise. “Have a seat,” he said in a friendly enough manner. He studied me carefully as I took a seat across from him. Then Bumpy began slowly, saying, “I hear you’ve been playing poker.”

“Yes, I play some poker,” I answered.

“I hear you’ve been losing pretty good.”

“Yeah, I haven’t been winning a lot.”

Bumpy didn’t smile at that. Instead, catching me by surprise, he gave me a serious look and said, “I want you to stop playing poker.”

“Oh?”

“I know the people you’ve been playing with, and you can’t win there.”

I understood instantly what he meant. A silence fell between us. He stared at me to see if what he had just said had gotten through.
Satisfied, he continued, “Listen, I like you. If you want to gamble, go to the Rhythm Club.” He was referring to the most famous among Harlem’s many gambling houses. He went on, “It’s clean, aboveboard, and nobody’s going to cheat you. If you’re lucky, you’ll win, and if you’re unlucky, you’ll lose. But I don’t want you playing with the guys you’ve been playing with anymore, and don’t mention this to anybody.”

I agreed, and afterward whenever he saw me, he was very friendly, very gracious, and I guess he saw me as the kind of good kid he wanted me to be. He was much older than I, and he didn’t want us to hang out together. He just wanted me to stay on the straight and narrow.

Looking back, I realize what a godsend Bumpy Johnson was in my life at that time. From then on, I was more careful as to who was running the game. Another sensible choice that I made in regard to gambling was to set limits on how much money I was willing to lose. Whatever I was earning on a weekly basis, I couldn’t gamble it away. First I had to cover rent, food, subway fare, business and career expenses, and so on. After those basic needs were met, I would put away a certain amount of money with which to gamble. Again, here was the balancing act between want and need.

As my responsibilities increased as a homeowner, in my marriage, and with kids continuing to come, I still gambled, but again with a sense of caution. I was not risking everything: a portion was put aside solely for gambling purposes.

In time, the more money I made, the higher the stakes I was willing to risk. If I made ten thousand dollars, I would put aside a thousand dollars for gambling purposes; if I made twenty-five thousand dollars, I would put aside twenty-five hundred.

When I first went to Las Vegas, I found it to be every bit the seducer it promised to its customers through its risqué advertisements. It sells
itself with every means of seduction that it can and makes no bones about it. What one sees is what one gets. In due course, I went there several times, but always limiting my losses by a predetermined percentage.

I kept it that way for a long time, but in the aggregate I was losing enough money to have been able to do something much more productive and useful than just gambling it away.

After I attained a goodly amount of success in my career, I was able to return periodically to Nassau. There on Paradise Island, I used to join in poker games in the offices of a guy named Jack, who managed a large hotel in that resort area. He was a nice man, quite pleasant, with a friendly personality, and he loved to gamble. Poker was his game.

Jack had put together a group of guys, lawyers and other professionals, whose income levels were well above average. We would meet in Jack’s office, he would order food, and we would go until two or three o’clock in the morning.

One night, as I was crossing the bridge on my way home from one such poker game, there wasn’t a soul anywhere you looked. No living creature north, east, west, or south. The moon was the biggest I had ever seen it, and it was way off over the other islands, sitting at that far elusive point where the sea and sky meet. With that white orb hanging there for me, my thoughts zeroed in on my addiction to gambling.

I turned around and looked in the opposite direction, which was in the general direction of where I grew up on Cat Island, and then over to the dock where I had arrived when I first came to Nassau with my mother. Turning in a different direction, I cast my gaze deeper into the neighborhoods of Nassau, where some of my fam
ily was still living: brothers, cousins, and aunts. And among all the individuals in our family groupings, there were children.

Now, in the poker game that night I had lost ten thousand dollars. How many of those young people, I asked myself, could I have put through college? At that time, college in the West Indies would have been three thousand dollars for one person. Or, I could have sent a couple of kids to school in the United States or Canada.

I turned back to look at the moon, looked around myself once more, and I decided, on that bridge, never to gamble again, because it was a wanton waste of a resource that could be put to better use.

The test came shortly thereafter when I left Nassau and went to Las Vegas, where the comedian Alan King had invited me to participate in a fund-raising celebrity pro-am tennis tournament. Typically at such events, celebrity amateurs play the first day and then the rest of the time are encouraged to gamble or take in the shows and sights of Las Vegas. Now, I get there and remind myself that I am not a gambler anymore, but I have to prove it to myself.

Fine. My first day there I went to the casino cashier’s window and asked for three thousand dollars against a line of credit I had. Yes! That’s correct. Then I took the chips and put them in the handkerchief pocket of my suit jacket, and I walked in and out of that casino for eight days or more, and I didn’t gamble once. I would intentionally stop at the craps table, the baccarat table, or the roulette table—just to test my will. At the end of my stay, I returned the chips to the cashier and left. I returned to Las Vegas several times subsequently, and never gambled.

But there were the other addictions yet to be dealt with: smoking and drinking.

As to smoking, having begun at the age of seventeen, I was now several years into it. Then on a hot, hot day in Nigeria, where I was making a picture,
The Mark of the Hawk,
with Eartha Kitt, my nose suddenly started to bleed. It was just flowing, and for the longest time I couldn’t stop it. It scared the daylights out of me. I somehow made a connection between the nosebleed and smoking, for I had eventually gone from two packs a day to three. I decided then and there to stop.

We worked in Nigeria for a couple of weeks more, and then went to London to finish the movie.
There,
I said to myself,
I haven’t touched a cigarette in three weeks: I am in the clear. To prove I am in the clear, I am going to smoke one cigarette, put it out, and not have another one, and then I will know I’ve got it licked.

I smoked that first cigarette, and before two days had passed, I was back on three packs a day.

This continued when I later made the picture
Porgy and Bess
with Dorothy Dandridge, Sammy Davis Jr., Diahann Carroll, and Brock Peters. When it was finished, I went home to Mt. Vernon, New York, where I was living with my first wife and kids; but by then there were stresses in my marriage, which only increased my smoking.

It was in Mt. Vernon that I was able to fully see the hold the demon had on me on one particular night when, to my horror, I couldn’t find even a cigarette butt in the house. I went into the garage and, in near panic, emptied the trash can out onto the floor, looking. There were some butts there, but they were soggy from the garbage.

So I went back into the house, got out of my pajamas, put on my clothes—including snow boots and an overcoat—got my car keys, and drove from Mt. Vernon into the Bronx, looking for a store still
open where I could buy a pack of cigarettes. This was how bad the addiction had become.

Having quit once and then fallen back, I felt I was never going to be able to stick to my determination because I didn’t have a reason strong enough. I thought about it then, and I created a reason. It was the kind of reason that represented everything and everyone that mattered to me, and I made a secret agreement with myself that I, absolutely, could not break; and I have not smoked a cigarette since. And the promise remains a secret.

There yet remained the drinking problem. Granted, I was not an alcoholic or even near being what some people would consider a heavy drinker. In the beginning, I would have, on a given day, one drink. Then it became two drinks. Sometimes I would have a can of beer or two; sometimes I would have one or more drinks of rum or scotch.

Not long after meeting Joanna Shimkus—who, as you have heard, eventually became my wife and is your great-grandmother by marriage—my drinking habits began to change. In those early days, we would often go to a favorite restaurant in New York and have a bottle of wine with dinner. We did that for about a month or so, and then one day I noticed that around four o’clock each afternoon, I began looking anxiously forward to the dinner hour. Not because of the dinner, but because of the wine.
Aha,
I realized,
this has the earmarks of an addiction.
Having learned from other arenas, I decided that I was not going to be subject to it. And I stopped drinking cold turkey. That was some forty years ago.