Life Beyond Measure (19 page)

I
t is not a bad idea, Ayele, as you grow into adulthood, to fix your eye on people of your parents’ generation, or perhaps those even older, to find those you can admire for their qualities of character and contribution. Heroes and role models are important, especially because when you think of them they have the ability to buoy your spirits and ignite your energies to move you onward.

In my own time, I found such people, and if you read of them in your history books or would like to share heroes with me that I have counted as most inspirational in my time, that would please me greatly. Some I was fortunate enough to know personally; others I was not, but my admiration for them developed nevertheless.

But it’s more than just admiration; it is also a deep appreciation for their having been instrumental and transformational in my life through their examples, their stances, and their courage. These are men and women who were fearless and yet mindful of the dangers to themselves, and to all they held close to themselves in terms of their responsibilities.

The cold, hard fact of courage is that it has to spring from within, because its opposite, fear, lives inside of us as well—as I’ve written about to you at length. Fear really is alive, even when it’s just sitting there and we are free from its influence; still we are aware how dangerous it is, how debilitating it is, how crippling it is, and how it stops us sometimes.

The people that I count among my heroes and role models are men and women who had to make up their minds within themselves. They had to look at the cost. One that might very well be bodily harm, even death; it might very well be a stain on their character or their reputation. All those things come into play.

I am particularly grateful for having had exposure to Nelson Mandela, one of the most stalwart examples of courage that I know, and a person I was honored to play in the film
Mandela and de Klerk
in 1997. Earlier, in 1950, I had a near-meeting with Mandela when I was in South Africa to make Cry
, the Beloved Country
and was invited by Dickie Niaka, my driver, to come to a picnic.

“What kind of picnic?” I asked.

He said, “Well, it’s some people who are kind of political.”

I thought
, Uh-oh, that doesn’t sound too good.
But I told him, “Sure, I’d like to go,” because I liked him.

It was a wonderful picnic in a park. There were members from the African National Congress and the Indian National Congress, men who were wanted by authorities for their violent opposition to the
apartheid government. I didn’t see Mandela, but I heard later that he was there. He was eventually arrested, and spent more than a quarter of a century in prison, a man the South African government evidently thought too dangerous to be free, but also by then too prominent to be killed. By the early 1990s he was out of prison and, in an astonishing display of brilliance and perseverance, won the Nobel Peace Prize and became the first democratically elected president of South Africa.

During all that time, I had come back to America and gotten on with my life and career. Then one day I received a call from Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley’s office saying Nelson Mandela was coming to California, and the mayor would like for me to be there. Now, I don’t know if he was asking me because of my celebrity junk, or inviting me because Mandela had given him my name. It didn’t matter; I went.

At city hall, I didn’t join in the crowd because I don’t push myself into the forefront of things like that. Instead, as is always my habit, I was over against a wall as the grand procession passed through, with the guest of honor and the mayor amid an entourage of many lieutenants as they headed through a corridor to get to the building’s balcony. Suddenly Mandela looked over in my direction and said, “Sidney!” And I am thinking:
Oh, my God! He called my name!

He came toward me and I went toward him and he hugged me and I said, “It’s a pleasure to see you, sir,” and he said, “It is good to see you,” and with that, we started talking and pretty soon had to be subtly encouraged to continue our conversation at a later date. I was famous in my house for two days after that.

Some time later, I went to South Africa to make the film in which I played him, and when we arrived the film company got in touch with his office in Cape Town. Mandela invited Joanna and me, my
daughter Sherri, and a friend of Sherri’s over, and he received us for tea.

More visits followed, one when Joanna and I saw him again in Los Angeles in conjunction with fund-raising for his foundation, to which we contributed, and then a visit at his hotel—where he was staying with one of his daughters. We had a wonderful time, with long discussions that gave me grist for the philosophical mill for months to come. We visited again in his offices in Cape Town. After that, we maintained a correspondence, in the course of which he thoughtfully sent books and other written materials of interest my way.

Oprah Winfrey asked me a few years later to attend the festivities connected with the opening of her school in South Africa, and I said yes, gladly, not only out of admiration for her, but also because I would get a chance to see Nelson Mandela again. And indeed, I saw him twice, once when he came to speak at the school, and again the next day. He made himself available to all of Oprah’s friends who came from far and wide, and he sat in his office in a chair. We were all brought in, but were told the briefer, the better: just a “hello” and “thank you,” and a picture of each person would be taken and copies sent. I walked in, he recognized me right away, and we talked. But I was very observant of the need not to tax him. We said we would stay in touch.

He was physically weakened, but his mind was still quite good, and his memory seemed to be in excellent condition—a great man among the men who exemplify unimaginable courage.

It was a challenge to play him in the 1997 film, in that I wanted to do so in such a way that his people would see that I had made as worthy an effort as I possibly could. No one can be him but him, but I tried to re-create his physical characteristics, the way he
walked, and certainly the way he spoke; I came pretty close with that. His years of forced labor in the quarries during his imprisonment caused damage to his legs, giving him a limp, and hours of punishment from the blazing sun had left their mark. Those physical details certainly gave me insights into his extraordinary essence.

Another man of my time was Thurgood Marshall. He was a man who went to the most dangerous places in the most dangerous years of social unrest in America. At great personal risk, he had to enter and leave courtrooms with caution, spend many nights secreted away in homes of local supporters, and be transported out of hostile towns in unexpected ways. It was rumored that he once was driven to safety out of a particularly dangerous town in a hearse. I heard such stories from people who were close enough to have had firsthand knowledge. I never forgot hearing how he once said to a supporter who was courageous enough to provide him lodging that it would be best if he was given a room “away from windows.”

As with Mandela, I had the great opportunity to play Thurgood Marshall in a motion picture, and it was an honor to do so. In preparing to play him, I had to know about his childhood, his life in Baltimore, when he was a young man and could hardly get into college, when he worked for the NAACP, and when he went to the Supreme Court.

Once you know about a man like that, and in your mind’s eye you see what he has endured, you wonder what the forces were that enabled him to say, “I am going to do this. I might not get home alive, but I have to do this thing. I must do it.” And to have the resolution in himself that says, “I am OK. If I have to do it, I have to do it. If I don’t do it, I wouldn’t be me, so here we go.”

That is applicable to every one of the people I mention here, ones whose lives were certainly on the line but whose courage was such
that they were able to face the fears and do what they needed to do in order to be at peace with themselves.

I also knew and traveled with Jackie Robinson; I was often at Dodger Field in Brooklyn in the heyday of the era when he played. I knew that he was not wanted in that ballpark by a great number of people. I saw the way they behaved, including many of the fellow players—athletes—trying to eradicate him from the game of American baseball. But Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey had been looking for such a man—one who had to be extremely gifted at what he did as an athlete and had to be extremely courageous to endure the challenges: to get up at bat and have people throw balls at him, the throwing of which may have looked like an accident but was no accident. Jackie Robinson was the guy.

Jackie had to make a choice: taking insults was not in his nature, but he knew that he had to do it, despite the possibility of damage to himself; his life was absolutely on the line. There were people who didn’t want him there, even if they had to do away with his life to get him out of baseball. That wasn’t the kind of democracy they believed in.

Jackie and I got to know each other when he was an executive at Chock Full O’ Nuts. We often met at their store at the corner of Seventh Avenue and 125th Street. Later, my first wife, Juanita, and I went on vacation with Jackie and his wife, Rachel, along with Marty Baum and his wife. We went to the Bahamas and had an enjoyable time, but it was raining constantly. We had ten days, but after three days of pure rain, we decided we couldn’t afford to waste the whole holiday since we came for sunshine and beaches. So we decided to fly from the Bahamas to Mexico. We wound up in Acapulco, which was absolutely terrific until the day when Jackie was off somewhere else and Marty said, “Let’s go swimming”—which,
of course, ended up with the close call when the two of us very nearly drowned.

But there was another athlete before Jackie who stands tall in the pantheon of courage—an athlete and more: Paul Robeson. This was a truly remarkable man. He was a great athlete, an accomplished musician, and a wonderfully well-educated man who was fluent in as many as eight different languages.

He was highly respected in the African American community, but I also knew, for reasons that I touched on earlier, that some were fearful of an association with Robeson, because he was a target of political forces in the country and was often accused of being a Communist.

I don’t know if he was a Communist or not; I really, truly don’t know. I never saw or heard him say anything about being a Communist. He didn’t label himself anything. He repeatedly said that he was working on behalf of disenfranchised fellow Americans who were being denied their full citizenship as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States of America. He was received as an artist of renown throughout Europe as well as Russia and was greatly admired everywhere for his concert appearances, as well as his aims and aspirations as far as his people in the United States were concerned—for whom he was asking for fair play. He wanted black people to be given the rights of democracy. I believe he was genuine in that wish, and I believe he was genuinely extending himself in that regard.

I admire him for his courage and for the person I witnessed him to be when I attended some of his concerts where he sang and spoke. I respected him and believed that he was too smart to allow himself to be used by the Soviet Union or the United States. He was interested in full citizenship in the country of his birth. He didn’t
have it and his fellow African Americans didn’t have it, and I believe that was his mission, his principal interest.

So to me he walked the earth as a man of courage.

I spent some time with James Baldwin, too. I was in France, and he asked Joanna and me to his place in Saint-Paul de Vence, near Nice. He put on a wonderful lunch for us, and my wife was totally captivated because of what she saw in him. He was a tiny man, and very knowledgeable about life, though in his experiences he had faced enormous difficulties—some of which had to make him the kind of remarkable, powerful writer that he was. It was a painful life—not all of the time, but certainly part of the time.

Baldwin was born in an age that was not really ready for him—a time when he had to be careful, watch his own back, when it was not a good time to be gay. But he was not in any way trying to behave to the contrary. He had most of his difficulties here in America; in Europe, it was not a problem to the same extent. He was comfortable there because he had friends who embraced him for who he was.

After spending time with him, I could see that he had no interest in denying that he was homosexual, and he was quite close with other homosexuals: great writers, filmmakers, and playwrights. He was most at ease with people who were not judgmental.

I admired him because of his courage.

Then, of course, there was Ralph Bunche, smart as a whip, bright, gifted, trying to bring peace between the Israelis and their neighbors in the Middle East. Being U.N. mediator in that part of the world was a tough job, but he had the credentials, fought his way through, maintained his responsibilities, and gained respect for himself, fellow African Americans, the United States, the United Nations, and the world, for his efforts. Fifty years later, we definitely could use his
kind of leadership. Ralph Bunche was a person who put himself on the line, courageously, with vision and tenacity.

I have seen those same qualities of vision in Oprah Winfrey, a woman I’m happy to call a friend. Oprah speaks to the heart in all of us. She has managed to tap into the hopes and dreams and lives of millions of Americans, and millions of others around the world. It seems she was designed by the power of the universe and sent forth on a mission so profound that her impact cannot be fully explained. Meanwhile, she shares with us the self that she is: from her humble beginnings, and on through the ordinary activities of her early life, creating an unbreakable bond with the spirit of millions of her fellow human beings.

Like my mother, she has a connection to the forces “Up There.” Like my mother, her faith is rock solid. Because of her courage to explore unanswered questions, we have spirited discussions. And sometimes she gets the better of me!