4
There was no mistaking the blinding light of stardom when Diahann Carroll walked through the hallway. She was only two years older than me, but she was way ahead of me and everyone else at Music and Art. Watching her between classes was an unforgettable experience. She floated out the classroom door surrounded by a crowd of friends, admirers, and others content just to be close to her. It was as if she were already famous and waiting for the rest of the world to catch on.
They did. A year after graduating from Music and Art, she made her first film, Carmen Jones, with Dorothy Dandridge, and earned a Tony Award nomination for her role in the Broadway musical House of Flowers, in a cast that included Pearl Bailey, Alvin Ailey, and Geoffrey Holder. I saw her in House of Flowers and thought she was brilliant. Her success helped the rest of us, whether we were actors, musicians, or artists, believe we had equally bright futures. One of us had made it. The door was open for all of us.
Around that same time my mother took the bold and brave step of auditioning for a role in a small, off-Broadway production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, and she got it. By the time we got done congratulating her, there wasn’t a person in our building and maybe our entire block who didn’t know she was fulfilling her lifelong dream to sing onstage.
The theater was on the Lower West Side. She went there after getting off work at the jewelry store. Catching buses and subways took time, and depending on the crowds and the weather, it could sap her energy, but I had never seen my mother happier. She was a natural. Most nights I met her after the show and accompanied her home. It was our special time together to talk about her performance and all the little things that had happened that night. I was reminded of when I was in The Firebrand of Florence, except our roles were reversed. She was onstage, and I was watching from the side.
I almost landed onstage myself. During school one day, as I walked across campus to a class, I stopped to bum a cigarette from a friend who was in conversation with a couple who looked ten or fifteen years older than us. That’s how I met John Stix and Lyn Austin. John was preparing to direct a new Broadway show called Take a Giant Step, and Lyn was the producer. They were looking for a young guy to play the lead role.
Stix explained the play was about racism in the United States. In it, a Black high school student in an all-White school is suspended after objecting to his teacher’s characterization of slaves in the South as lazy and stupid, something that wouldn’t have been treated as severely if the student objecting had been White—though, as the director pointed out, White students in the class didn’t object. I understood, and the four of us traded thoughts on the topic.
Stix and his producer asked about my studies, my interest in the arts, and whether I had acted before.
“I’m a painter,” I said. “But I was on Broadway when I was seven years old.”
Stix was surprised. “What play?”
“The Firebrand of Florence,” I said.
He knew it.
“John Murray Anderson directed,” I added. “And Lotte Lenya starred.”
I could tell John was intrigued. He said I had a unique quality and offered me a shot at the lead. I agreed to try. For the next two weeks, Stix worked with me after school. He liked that I was raw and inexperienced, but, as he told me, he wanted to see if I had the depth and force of personality to portray a character in such a major role. Could I make the audience believe I was that character?
I didn’t know. The material he had me read was hard. John tried to bring out things in me that I wasn’t ready to embrace, and though I tried, I couldn’t get to the emotions he saw inside me. After a while, I could tell I wasn’t delivering what he wanted, I kind of gave up. One day, he stopped me midsentence.
“You don’t want to do this, do you?” he said.
I shook my head no, it wasn’t that I didn’t want to. “I can’t,” I said. “I can’t get to where you’re telling me I need to go.”
“You can’t?” he said. “Or you don’t know how?”
I shrugged, disappointed in myself. Acting was hard; maybe I couldn’t do it. John wrapped his arm around my shoulders and gave me a gentle shake. “Billy, don’t beat yourself up. You can do this—and you can be good. You just aren’t ready.”
He found another newcomer across the city who was up to the task, seventeen-year-old Louis Gossett Jr., a senior at Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn. He made his acting debut in Take a Giant Step, which was a hit on Broadway before running even longer off-Broadway. It launched Louis’s long and celebrated career. I never regretted what might have been if I could have summoned the maturity and depth required by the part. What John said to me was true: I wasn’t ready yet.
The experience still opened me up. I paid attention when we studied poetry in my English class. Suddenly I was interested in one of my academic classes. I fell in love with Walt Whitman’s words, and when my turn came to stand up in front of the class and recite his poem “O Captain! My Captain!” I drew on my work with Stix and read with the feeling I imagined Whitman had as he wrote about the end of the Civil War and President Abraham Lincoln’s death. My reading surprised everyone, including myself. It sounded the way poetry is supposed to sound when it’s read. I gave the words a heartbeat.
Afterward, I sat down at my desk and returned to my quiet, introverted self. But I’d seen the way my classmates had paid attention to what should probably be considered my first adult performance. I had tapped into whatever it was that John Stix had seen in me, that thing everyone has that lets them know they are doing exactly what they should be doing, that they have found themselves—or at least a piece of the puzzle.
Late in the semester we read “Invictus,” William Ernest Henley’s nineteenth-century ode to courage and self-determination, and that epic poem awakened something inside me. The first time I read the opening stanza—“Out of the night that covers me, / Black as the pit from pole to pole, / I thank whatever gods may be / For my unconquerable soul”—I felt the shiver of discovery, the aha exhilaration of recognition. The work gave voice and meaning and direction to the emotions stirring in me at seventeen years old.
My unconquerable soul.
That was me! I had always wanted to be a hero.
The poem was a road map for me. “It matters not how strait the gate / How charged with punishments the scroll, / I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul.”
That summer I took over my father’s jobs for a week while he went out of town. Not only did I end up seeing my father in a whole new way, but I also experienced a part of his life that I wouldn’t have otherwise known and learned what it means to be a hero in real life.
My father had bought a brand-new Buick Special, a two-door sedan with a powerful V-8 engine. He was someone who never bought anything unless he could pay cash, and he had finally saved up enough money, almost three thousand dollars, to purchase that 1954 beauty. I remember the day he drove it home and parked it in front of our building. It seemed like everyone came outside to admire it.
He got the car so he could drive to Texas to visit his mother, whom he hadn’t seen since he moved to New York and married my mother almost twenty years earlier. He took Lady with him and left me to stay with my mother and grandmother and to fill in for him at work so he wouldn’t lose any pay. He had one main full-time job, doing maintenance and custodial work for a large building in Midtown, and a couple smaller, similar jobs. I didn’t receive any training beforehand. I just showed up, clocked in, put on his heavy work gloves, and stepped straight into the eight-hour workday, which was actually more than eight hours. Then I left to do the second job, which was after-hours cleanup for a nearby building. By the time I got home, I was exhausted. My entire body, twenty years younger than his, ached. I didn’t want to go back. One day was enough. But like him, I got up the next day and went to work.
That week was the greatest lesson of my entire life. I experienced firsthand how hard this man worked every day, laboring in a job that so many people thought of as menial. What an impression that made on me. I always knew my father was a hard worker, but I didn’t know how hard he actually worked, or what it truly meant to work hard, to work hard physically, and to work like that every day, which was what he did—without complaint.
And that’s who he was. A man of great character and an unconquerable soul. He taught me about humility. He taught me about responsibility and devotion. He taught me about love. And he taught me what it meant to work, to be part of the working class—and to take pride in that. As I said, he was a hero. My hero.
At seventeen, I lost my virginity. A woman in our building who was raising several children lured me into her apartment one day and seduced me. It didn’t take much effort. She was in her mid-thirties, slender, and very pretty—the stereotypical lonely, bored housewife, I guess. Her husband was at work, and she had her eye on me. Once she got me inside her place, she knew exactly what she wanted to do. I was at that age where all I knew was that I was having sex. I didn’t know how or why, only that it was happening.
And it kept happening. She told me when it was safe to knock on her door, and I did. Then the door opened a crack and she literally pulled me inside as if I was delivering groceries and she was starving, which she was—but not for food! We also snuck up to the building’s roof. I was lucky her husband never found out, or else I wouldn’t be remembering this episode with a smile on my face.
There was a similar situation with a woman who lived at 147th Street and Eighth Avenue. I met her through a gay friend of mine who lived in her building and had a bunch of us up to the roof to drink cheap Sneaky Pete wine. She picked me out of the crowd, told me that her husband worked at the post office, and invited me to visit her. I walked in the first time and never made it past the kitchen.
I kept these encounters from my girlfriend, Sondra, whom I knew from school. We started going out early in my junior year, and we were still tight as seniors. We had met at one of the Jack and Jill parties that my sister took me to. Like Lady, Sondra was part of the smart set of the Black bourgeoisie, but she saw through my tattered clothes and tortured facade and pegged me as more of a sophisticated, artsy snob than an angry rebel.
“You’re funny, Billy,” she said.
“Why?” I wondered.
“Because you are—and that you don’t know it is even funnier.”
“Okay,” I said.
“And you’re cute.”
I was Sondra’s escort at the cotillion, and the two of us were very quickly inseparable. We went to the movies and walked through Central Park, where we had many of our romantic moments. I loved kissing her. Soft. Hard. Passionately. Sondra was a good kisser, too. The anticipation of our lips coming together was constantly on my mind. I learned how much emotion and feeling could be communicated in a kiss—desire, pleasure, jealousy, need, turmoil, anger, calm, sensuality, soulfulness, and love.
Were Sondra and I in love? It often felt like it. But we were still kids, and both of us always needed our own space, our independence, and while we shared genuine affection for each other, an attraction that kept us together, we allowed each other to wander off. Sometimes that meant being with other people; other times it meant going out solo to see what might happen. There was nothing as exciting as a new infatuation, the intoxicating effect of discovering beauty, the chess moves of a new romance, and the high of a first kiss.
For instance, I took Sondra to my senior prom, and we had a good time, but after walking her back to her family’s place (the Dunbar Apartments on 150th Street), I wasn’t ready to go back home myself. Instead, I took the A train to 59th Street, walked to 52nd Street, and went to Birdland, the most famous of all the jazz-oriented nightclubs in the city. Bassist Oscar Pettiford was playing there.
I liked going places and doing things by myself. Whether I went to a museum, an art gallery, the ballet, the opera, or a concert, I wanted to have an experience all my own, without having to discuss it or share it with anyone else. I know that sounds selfish, and maybe so, but it made it more personal.
Pettiford was on fire when I got there. I had a table to myself close to the stage, and I listened until I was literally the last person in the five-hundred-seat club. Pettiford and I made eye contact throughout the night. I watched him in a way that let me feel his intensity, what it was like to lead his band and lose himself in the music. Pettiford noticed the intensity with which I watched him play. He seemed to dig that I was a kid who enjoyed what he was doing.
As his last set wound down, I even sensed that he wanted to talk to me. But I didn’t stick around to find out. I took the experience outside into the cool night air of New York City and walked home, still hearing the music, digesting the experience, and appreciating having danced and kissed and heard great jazz all in the same night.
In the fall, Sondra went off to Spelman College in Atlanta. My sister enrolled at NYU, where she majored in business. Knowing a traditional academic path wasn’t for me, I applied for and won a Hallgarten Award Scholarship to the National Academy of Design in New York. There I studied the principles of portrait painting under Robert Philipp and Ivan Olinsky. Both my instructors praised my work and said I had the talent to be an exceptional portrait artist. Their encouragement meant a lot, because I had no future plans other than being an artist.
One of the best pictures I painted that year was of my sister. In the portrait, which was titled Lady, I tried to capture everything I loved about my twin sister in a single expression. A couple years before, while she was studying with Russian dancer Boris Novikoff at the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, my sister had collapsed during a ballet class. The doctor said it was too much strain on her heart, and she was forced to give up dance. She managed any disappointment with a positive attitude and focused on academics. The look I gave her in the painting was the way my parents and I pictured our precious Lady at that moment when we feared losing her. It reminded us that life was fragile and unpredictable, and that’s the expression I put on her in the painting.
A few months into my first year of study at the Academy, I had my own health scare. My appetite waned. I lost weight. I had no energy. I had no idea what was wrong with me. At the time, I was reading about Modigliani and some of the other great painters who had suffered early deaths, and I was convinced that I had a fatal disease that was also going to take me way too soon. As I saw it, my life was a tragic romance.
My mother, aware of my tendency toward melodrama, sent me to our family doctor. After a thorough checkup, he said everything was normal and told me to take it easy for a few days. I did go home and get into bed, but I didn’t think rest was the solution. I was still convinced I was dying. I needed to create in the limited time I had left, to leave something for the world to remember me by.
The next day, feeling no better, I eased my weakening body out of bed and painted a self-portrait. In it, I look gaunt and filled with uneasy thoughts as I stare off into the distance, no doubt wondering if this was the end of Rico.
As it turned out, I survived. My mystery illness turned out to be a servere case of diarrhea.
Toward the end of my first year at the Academy, my friend Dickie Stroud came back from the service and I helped get him a scholarship to study painting there, too. The two of us rented a studio on the second floor of a building at 79th Street and Central Park West. Like all artists, we needed an atelier. Rent was six dollars a week. We actually did some painting there, but we mostly used it as a place to take girls, since both of us still technically lived at home with our families.
I was always out and about in the city, looking to have experiences, intrigued by almost everything, and my God, what a time it was to be in New York. I attended a lecture by Ayn Rand at the 92nd Street Y. I also saw poet Dylan Thomas there. Do not go gentle into that good night. I was near the front for Spanish flamenco dancer Carmen Amaya at the Coliseum. The same with José Greco and Antonio. I loved that world, the drama, the romance of those dancers. I even took flamenco lessons for a while. My mother and I saw Lotte Lenya at the Coliseum. I hadn’t seen her since I was in Firebrand of Florence, but my mother had kept in touch, and afterward we went backstage to say hello.
While we were there, Greta Garbo walked in. She made an entrance, wearing a white suit—a men’s suit—and matching white fedora. She took everyone’s breath away, the room went silent—until that silence was broken by a one-word whisper: Garbo. Then when my mother and I finally went into Lenya’s dressing room, the inner sanctum, there was Garbo, spread out and relaxed in a chair. She had dispensed with the grandeur and mystique and was just present, and real. My mother loved it. This was the world of movie stars that she had been enamored with, and no one was like Garbo.
I went to the Met, and one day as I was looking at all these wonderful paintings, it dawned on me that there was nothing on the walls that told me anything about me. It didn’t anger me, it motivated me to create something of my own. But I was always figuring out where I fit in in the grand scheme of things. One place I fit in was at a jazz club. The Village Gate, the Blue Note, the Village Vanguard downtown. Minton’s up in Harlem. Then on 52nd Street, it was the Famous Door, Club Carousel, the Three Deuces, Club Samoa, and Birdland, where I’d seen Oscar Pettiford. The intricacies of jazz appealed to me, the original and abstract interpretations, the way the musicians followed form and then took off.
There was nothing like walking into a club by myself and going wherever the musicians took me. I heard Charlie Parker, Dizzy, Miles, singer Betty Carter, whom I regarded as the Picasso of singers and who became a good friend years later. I also followed Balanchine and loved what he was doing at the New York City Ballet. I went to the symphony. And in the fall my friend Joey Ford and I landed work as extras at the Metropolitan Opera. It paid two dollars a performance. For Verdi’s Aida, one of the Met’s signatures—and a massive production involving carrying the young warrior Radamès on a sedan chair—we got three dollars.
This might not have paid as well as a regular nine-to-five job, but it was so much better. To be onstage at the Met and feel part of this music, this spectacle, was magical. I was surrounded by these remarkable voices, the greatest in the world, and the orchestra in the pit playing some of the greatest music ever composed, and the technicality of these productions. It was easy to get swept up in the grandiosity of Il Barbiere di Siviglia, Faust, Salome, and La Traviata.
My friend Dickie Stroud snapped this picture of me painting a scene in Central Park when I was at the Academy.
One night I stood in the wings and watched Italian tenor Mario Del Monaco and mezzo soprano Risë Stevens compete over which one of them was wearing the most sequins. I also watched them cough up big balls of phlegm before they went onstage and sang. For my friend Joey, the experience was even better. He was gay, and so it seemed were most of the other extras, except for me. Every night we partied in the Met’s basement, transforming this bastion of culture into one of the city’s hottest underground clubs.
I had never seen as many men who were as attractive as women. Some were even more beautiful. There was dancing, singing, gossiping, drinking, smoking, and silliness lasting into the wee hours. At twenty years old, I might not have figured out my life, but I was confident enough about who I was and what I liked, and I knew I liked being part of everything at the Met, including what might have been the best show of the night several floors beneath the real show. What an extraordinary time!