To Selena, With Love (30 page)

It was ten acres, with a hill that would be the perfect site for the house that we planned to fill with the sounds of music, children, and laughter. There was a pond for our children to fish in, and a creek where we could wade or just dream in the shade. Selena could have her horses, finally. Those ten acres were custom made for us, and we placed an offer on that land the same day we saw it.

“I can really see us here,” I said. “When I’m, like, eighty years old, I’m going to sit right here on the porch of our house. I’ll be so bored that I’ll spend the afternoons cracking pecans with a pair of pliers, and we’ll have so much time on our hands that there will be hundreds of coffee cans full of shelled pecans all over the damn porch.”

Selena laughed. “And what will I be doing, if the kids are gone and I’m not singing anymore?”

I looked her over, keeping a straight face. “You? You’ll be sitting right here on the porch next to me, knitting.”

Our love had been renewed because Selena and I had truly examined what we had discovered in each other—and how much we stood to lose if we parted. Now we were ready to accompany each other into a future filled with love and family. We had found a place to build our home and grow old together.

We might never make it back to Jamaica, but this would be our own retreat, a private piece of paradise just for Selena and me. It was perfect.

AP Photo /
Houston Chronicle,
John Everett

W
hat we didn’t know, of course, was that the cancer was growing while we went on with our lives. Yolanda seemed to be everywhere now, determined not to just have a finger in every pie, but her whole hand. She had become so involved in running the boutiques that Selena had given her complete access to all checking and credit card accounts.

Honestly, it was probably Martin Gomez, the fashion designer working closely with Selena on her clothing designs, who first started noticing something off with Yolanda. He would bring little things to Selena’s attention, examples of how Yolanda was manipulating people or trying to control too many aspects of the business.

Martin told us that some of the other employees in the boutiques were having run-ins with Yolanda and were threatening to quit. “She’s mean and controlling,” he told Selena. “There’s a lot of tension at work. She yells at my seamstresses and even at me. I don’t think I can work under these conditions.”

It was true that when Selena first started the boutiques, she had friends working for her. Yolanda had slowly gotten rid of Selena’s friends. Now, according to Martin, Yolanda had also started telling
people that they shouldn’t call Selena directly anymore—they should call her instead. She was acting more like Selena’s bodyguard than a personal assistant. When one of Martin’s seamstresses went to Yolanda’s house to pick something up, she had been startled to discover that the walls were covered with Selena’s photos.

“I just think it’s kind of weird how Yolanda is trying to get in between you and everybody else,” Martin told Selena. “She’s obsessed with you and I’m a little scared of her.”

Martin’s concerns should have been a red flag for us. As always, though, Selena and I were so busy that we overlooked all of the signs showing us that Yolanda was truly becoming unhinged. Truthfully, Martin was opinionated, like most artists, and we figured that like most artists he didn’t want anyone telling him what to do. When it came to Yolanda and Martin and their conflicts, we really didn’t think there was anything going on beyond a couple of people having too much attitude and going at each other.

Selena, meanwhile, still trusted Yolanda. In fact, she was glad to have Yolanda take calls and otherwise run interference for her at the boutiques. She even gave Yolanda a key to our house.

In addition to keeping up with her intense performance schedule, Selena was becoming more and more determined to get her clothing factory and boutique up and running in Mexico, and Yolanda was helping her. Since Yolanda was fluent in Spanish, she would go into business meetings in Mexico with Selena—something I would have been useless at, since I neither spoke Spanish fluently nor had much knowledge about the fashion industry.

Gradually, though, even Selena and I started noticing that Yolanda was becoming clingier and odder. Whenever Selena was in San Antonio, Yolanda would try to insist on going everywhere with
her. Or Yolanda would call Selena at odd hours and tell her, “We have to go to Monterrey, because so-and-so wants us to have a meeting. We have to go right now!” Then she would get irritated because Selena wouldn’t jump when she said “jump.”

Selena, though, was loyal—especially to anyone in her close circle of family and friends. She tried to shield Yolanda for a long time. When Martin said that certain employees were complaining about Yolanda, Selena responded, “Those people are probably only complaining because Yolanda is the boss and they don’t want to listen to her.”

Besides, Yolanda always did everything in her power to make what seemed like her undying devotion to Selena abundantly clear—especially when she gave Selena a ring shaped like the Fabergé eggs Selena collected.

She had gotten her first one a couple of years earlier on one of our trips to Miami. We were staying in the Intercontinental Hotel there and, as always, Selena insisted on going into the gift shop. There, she saw her first Fabergé egg—an ostrich egg encrusted in gold with different precious stones set into it.

“It’s so beautiful,” she said.

For some reason, Selena was fascinated by that egg, so I bought it for her. She loved it, and from then on, I continued to buy Fabergé eggs for her whenever I saw them. I think that she was intrigued because, to her, eggs represented the beginning of life. The Fabergé eggs were also incredible handcrafted works of art. Selena’s egg collection became her pride and joy. She eventually started displaying the collection in our house, in glass-fronted cabinets—probably thirty or forty eggs in all.

Yolanda knew this, of course, so when some of the staff
members at the boutiques wanted to pool their money to buy Selena a gift, she told them to give the money to her and she would have a ring made that she knew Selena would love. The ring was beautiful—a gold ring with a white-gold egg set on top of it. Fifty-two tiny, glittering diamonds were embedded in the egg; on the fourteen-karat band itself, the letter “S” was engraved three times.

“I bought this for you,” Yolanda said, never mentioning how she had asked the other coworkers to contribute to the gift, or the fact that she had charged the $3,000 price for it on Selena’s corporate American Express account.

Selena was thrilled with the gift and started wearing it right away. “Look, Chris,” she said when she showed it to me. “See how thoughtful Yolanda can be?”

Why didn’t we detect the cancer? We were oblivious partly because we were even busier than ever. Our shows included playing for twenty thousand fans at Six Flags AstroWorld’s Southern Star Amphitheater in July, and performing with Mazz and Emilio Navaira in the third annual Tejano Superfest.

In December 1994, Selena headlined the New Year’s Eve dance at the George R. Brown Convention Center, and in January, she played a concert at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo in the Houston Astrodome for over sixty-five thousand fans. She was the headliner at Miami’s Calle Ocho Festival as well, which drew over one hundred thousand music lovers. Our album
Amor Prohibido
was nominated for a Grammy in 1994, and Selena recorded a duet called “Donde Quiera Que Estes” with the Barrio Boyz that hit number one on
Billboard
’s Hot Latin Tracks.

New opportunities for Selena continued to open up. In early 1995, she began making plans to create a perfume line. She was also excited to be given opportunities to explore acting. She really wanted to try being an actress and, as we had all discovered through making music videos and television commercials, she was good at it, too—a natural in front of the camera.

One of our promoters arranged for Selena to make guest appearances on
Dos Mujeres, Un Camino,
a popular Latin American soap opera, to give her exposure to an even broader audience. Selena was excited by the chance to appear on TV, but she was disappointed by that particular experience. She didn’t really enjoy playing the character as it was written for her, especially when the director told her that she had to kiss an actor playing a musician in a band.

“I’m not going to do that,” she protested. “I’m married. I just can’t. It’s not right.”

A friend of mine later asked if Selena had refused to kiss the other actor because of me, but I knew that wasn’t it. I was not insecure with her in any way. Maybe that’s another thing she saw in me: the fact that I wasn’t ever going to be one of those possessive men who was out to control her. People made comments about her body all of the time, but I never reacted to them, because I knew those rude remarks came with the celebrity turf.

If Selena had decided that she needed to kiss another actor to play her role convincingly, I would have been supportive. One thing that did bug me, though, was a Mexican tabloid that came out during Selena’s soap opera stint; the tabloid ran an interview with the guy who played Selena’s main love interest in the soap opera. The interviewer asked him the usual stupid questions, including, “If you could be with anybody one night, who would you pick?”

“Selena,” the actor answered.

But I wasn’t worried about Selena, simply because of how she was. Selena wasn’t in any way a flirt. She didn’t use sexuality to get what she wanted. She used her brains and her talent to achieve her goals. That other stuff just happened to come along with her when she was onstage. She was comfortable in her own skin, so she didn’t have to put on that kind of act so many celebrities do, where they walk into a room and expect everyone to turn around and stare in awe. Selena was always too down-to-earth to behave like a movie star.

Selena’s second acting experience was much more fun than the first. She was asked to play a small part as a mariachi singer in a movie called
Don Juan DeMarco
, starring Faye Dunaway, Johnny Depp, and Marlon Brando. We were both really excited about this, not only because it was an opportunity for Selena to be seen by many moviegoers who probably had never listened to Tejano music in their lives, but because of the high caliber of the actors involved.