18
On April 6, 1987, I turned fifty years old. The milestone birthday wasn’t a big deal. My mother and sister were praying for me. Among them, the joke about me was, He’s a nice guy but you’ve gotta forgive him; he doesn’t have any common sense. My family was in good health and thriving. I didn’t look any different than I did at forty or thirty. Physically, I couldn’t have felt any better. I was, as my mother said, blessed. I agreed. I was very blessed.
I had a small party at the Nucleus Nuance, a stylish restaurant that I’d invested in on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood. The jazz was some of the best in the city. Herbie Hancock dropped in unannounced enough times to give it an anything-can-happen vibe. A Joni Mitchell painting hung near the bar. And the salmon soufflé was named best in L.A. As champagne glasses clinked, I was teased about the absence of Colt 45. I got the joke and agreed a few cans of the malt liquor would have been fitting for the occasion.
The joke referred to the TV ads I did for Colt 45 Malt Liquor. They were scripted like mini romances. I impressed a beautiful woman by pouring an icy-cold can into a glass, then walked away with her and intoned, “Works every time.” The commercials started running in 1986; the scenarios varied, but I tried to bring a sensibility of modern elegance to each one. “There are two rules if you want to have a good time,” I said in one of the ads. “Rule number 1: Never run out of Colt 45. Rule number 2: Never forget rule number one.” In another one, I said, “I don’t think you can have a better time with Colt 45 than without it. But why take chances?”
Their popularity transcended the annoyance of commercial interruption, and they became part of the pop culture lexicon. They were spoofed on Saturday Night Live. They were repeated by strangers. And most of all, they were successful. They made me a lot of money. That was a big part of my motivation for doing them. I had become a personality, and I was trying to capitalize on it. But I was also expanding my brand in the way I had always envisioned. I was a romantic leading man.
Despite the obstacles Hollywood had put in my way over the years, or rather because of them, this was me having learned a few lessons, trying to shape my own image, and working to control my own destiny, just like the men in my family had done before me. Before signing on as Colt 45’s spokesperson, I met with the old man who owned the beer company and spoke with the agency creating the ads. I explained that I didn’t want to speak only to a Black constituency. My fans came in every shape, size, and skin color. The ads had to have universal appeal. Art had the ability to change an existing narrative or provide a new one. Movies did that. Why not TV advertising?
As I saw it, these Colt 45 ads were a way to reach millions of people with an image of a man they didn’t typically see on television.
Once the ads began to air, it turned out they liked what they saw. I was the Colt 45 pitchman for a decade before returning in 2016 to remind people that “sometimes change isn’t always a good thing when you got it right the first time around.” But in the mid-1980s, Hollywood was changing, slowly but surely, and it was definitely a good thing. Denzel Washington, Danny Glover, and Laurence Fishburne were among the talented young actors who emerged as bankable stars, and filmmakers Spike Lee and John Singleton brought cinematic voices so powerful and of-the-moment, they couldn’t be ignored.
In case anyone tried, Eddie Murphy stood onstage at the Academy Awards and scolded Hollywood for its lack of diversity. He said what others had always known but not said in a public forum. Then he went further. “Black people will not ride the caboose of society,” he said. “And we will not bring up the rear anymore. I want you to recognize us.”
When I came up, it was very different. Hollywood did not open its doors to people of color. You had to knock. For a Black person, every day was like showing up to a party you hadn’t been invited to and wondering whether they were going to let you stay. The new, younger generation of actors and filmmakers wasn’t asking permission to come in. They were creating entirely new doors. I applauded the breakthroughs. Selfishly, I wasn’t sure how this would impact me and my career. Would there be more opportunities? Fewer? Would I fit in? Would the new generation want to work with me? Would they know what to do with me?
I had always tried to present myself with a point of view that wouldn’t label or limit me, and I think I’ve been successful at avoiding being seen as anything but an excellent actor. I wasn’t old-school or new-school. After all these years, I was Billy Dee. But I think the new generation saw me as a departure from their experience, perhaps too much of one, too much of an elitist or simply a figure from another era. To a large degree, that was true. I came from the world of Charlie Parker and James Baldwin, not N.W.A. and Run-D.M.C. A new look and point of view was coming into vogue. I would have to see where and how I fit in.
Indie filmmaker Larry Cohen asked me to star in Deadly Illusion, a noirish movie about a New York private eye framed for a murder he didn’t commit. The story had been told a million times, but I liked Larry’s take and his attitude. He seemed wild and crazy in a good way. The movie co-starred Vanity and Morgan Fairchild and shot in Manhattan. I moved into the Mayflower Hotel, a favorite of actors working in the city. Late one night, Vanity knocked on my hotel room door, asking if I had any cash she could borrow.
I’d been having a hard time connecting with the singer-actress, who played my girlfriend, and now I knew why. She didn’t have to explain anything. There’s only one reason people go looking for cash in the middle of the night. She and her boyfriend were trying to buy drugs. I sent her away, feeling sad for her. For some, stardom was a curse. It might start as something fantastic, but it turns into a scary, lonely place, and I think she was one of those people. The previous year I’d made the movie Oceans of Fire with David Carradine, and he had come to my hotel room one day, sat down, and looked at me with the saddest eyes I had ever seen. “I need a friend,” he said. “I just need a friend.”
There was a bright side to the Deadly Illusion cast: Morgan Fairchild. Bright, vivacious, prepared, and sexy as hell, she played the woman whose husband had hired me to kill her. Morgan and I had a great time together. She was an independent Texas girl who lived life on her own terms. Our romantic scene was my first interracial kiss on camera. Before we shot the scene, I was surprised that I felt self-conscious about kissing her in front of the all-White crew. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before.
No one said anything to make me feel uncomfortable. But they didn’t have to. When you are a Black man, there are all sorts of invisible lines in the world that only you see, and you never get comfortable crossing them. I flashed back to a party I’d gone to at the home of a Columbia Pictures bigwig back when I was working with Jimmy Baldwin on the Malcolm X movie. The guest list was a who’s who of Hollywood, and when they saw me in this huge mansion—or so I imagined—they stared at me with expressions that seemed to ask, Why are you here? Who let you in?
Deadly Illusion was released in October 1987. Although New York Times critic Vincent Canby found an “engaging bravado” in the film, another critic said I must have been desperate to take the part. Then there was that rare individual who wrote the truth. “Instead of hiring hacks who put their empty heads together to write and direct, why can’t the small production companies look around for some talent—some fresh, Black talent to write some decent material for an established star like Mr. Williams?”
In January 1988 I ended a ten-year absence from the Broadway stage by taking over the lead from James Earl Jones in August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play Fences. Had it been only ten years? It seemed longer.
When first approached about taking over the role, I was dubious. Besides the daunting task of stepping into a role created by my friend James Earl, who had won his second Tony Award for his portrayal of the play’s main character, Troy Maxson (he’d also recently been inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame), I didn’t know if I wanted to leave home for six months. I’d be gone from January through June. Among other things, I’d have to miss my daughter’s fifteenth birthday.
Courtney B. Vance and James Earl Jones onstage in August Wilson’s Fences in 1987
“But this is August Wilson,” the producer argued. He invited me to see the play in New York. “Once you see it, you’re going to feel it, and then you’ll want to do it.”
He was right. I flew to New York, saw James Earl in the play, and experienced the power of the material.
Fences was set in the 1950s. Maxson was once a promising player in the Negro Leagues, now an embittered sanitation worker. He was a complex, unfulfilled man. I liked the issues the play raised about family, race, fathers and sons, and life and death. I saw things in Troy Maxson that hit close to home. The themes were universal. Everyone arrives at a point in their life where, like it or not, they have to reconcile the way they dreamed their life would be with the reality of the life they’ve lived; who they wanted to be and who they have become.
Troy Maxson and I were about the same age, and both of us were asking ourselves the same types of questions. He knew his potential had been wasted and his gifts ignored because of generations of racism so deeply ingrained in every corner of the country that the so-called American Dream might have had a sign on it specifically for him and those like him that said, Need Not Apply.
I related, and if something of the issues in the play didn’t apply specifically to me, I knew others for whom they did. As a kid, I’d been encouraged to dream. My children were also encouraged to dream. But my children grew up in Laurel Canyon. What about Black children who didn’t have those advantages? In other words, most Black children. What were they told to dream? Were they told how much harder it was going to be for them?
I thought of my aunt Sylvia’s two sons. Both were nice boys. Both were heroin addicts. One was thrown off the top of a building by drug dealers. My mother and I had to go to the morgue to identify the body. The other died of an overdose. The bruised and swollen needle marks in his arm are a picture that has stayed with me my whole life.
Where were the movies and books about Black lovers, artists, lawyers, and neighborhood heroes? Except for five roles—Brian’s Song, Lady Sings the Blues, Mahogany, and the two Star Wars movies—I had mostly played detectives and private eyes. Why not a college professor? A doctor? A lawyer? A writer? A scientist? A coach? Where was our Dirty Dancing, Moonstruck, Fatal Attraction, and Three Men and a Baby? Why not coming-of-age movies like The Breakfast Club or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? Or did Black kids not come of age?
People with dark skin weren’t shown falling in love or keeping love alive, as my parents had done. Where was our On Golden Pond?
I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art one day when I was in my early twenties. My father had taken me there countless times when I was a kid. I had gone there to look at art my entire life. But this one day, as I walked through the galleries, I realized that I didn’t see anyone in the paintings who looked like me. I walked out and never went back.
Imagine growing up without seeing people who look like you. Imagine growing up in a world where you don’t see people who look like you pursuing their dreams. You grow up thinking you and your dreams aren’t worth a damn. You ask why even bother, there must not be any hope. Without hope, what’s the point?
All this was going through my head during and after I saw the play. I realized Troy Maxson was an important character, with something to say that people needed to hear. I heard him. I wanted to make sure others did, too. And that was why I moved back to New York to play him.
I returned to the Mayflower Hotel. From the window of my hotel room, I could see up to the northern end of Central Park. In the January cold, the trees were bare and the ground hardened into browns and grays, and I could see my history throughout the city. School. Clubs. Museums and concerts. Girlfriends and love affairs. Making a name for myself on these very Broadway stages where I had returned once again, this time needing to find myself and some deeper meaning through the work I loved, the same work that caused me so much frustration and filled me with so many questions.
Rehearsals got off to a rocky start. I made some choices that irritated August—the most significant one was when I took a baseball bat and thrust it between my legs, letting the audience wonder if it was a crude gesture directed at them or the world—but that’s where I went, and the playwright let me explore Troy in my own way.
So did the director, Lloyd Richards, who also had issues with the aggressive direction I wanted to go in but saw the force and conviction of my interpretation and knew to let me run with it and find my way.
Fences was at the 46th Street Theatre. I slept late and took a car there most days just after the sky got dark. I felt like I knew Troy Maxson. A lot of him was my father. He was old-school. A tough guy who grew up in a rural place and migrated to the city. He suffered his wounds but without ever losing his sense of responsibility. You don’t abandon your family, no matter what. That was Troy Maxson. That was my dad. And that was me.
Playing him night after night was draining work. He was an unhappy, middle-aged garbage collector who’d seen his dreams discarded as fast as the garbage he collected. The more I played him, the more I found pieces of myself. Four months into the play, I turned fifty-one years old, and instead of celebrating my return to the Broadway stage, I found myself questioning everything about my life—what I’d accomplished, what I hadn’t accomplished, what I wanted to do with my life, what I needed to do, and so on.
I realized something was missing from my life—something important. It was art, the act of creating art. Drawing and painting had been part of what I did for almost my entire life. But I hadn’t painted—I hadn’t stood in front of a blank canvas mounted on an easel—for almost a decade, maybe longer. I didn’t know why I’d stopped. Only that I did.
Of course, I found reasons why (work, travel, raising children), and I made up excuses. I told myself that I’d lost my sense of color. However, once I acknowledged this—I don’t even know what to call it—this void, I couldn’t think about anything else. It was like I was ending a ten-year vow of silence. All of a sudden, I had so much to say—and the desire to express myself, express what was inside me, grew stronger and more urgent every day.
Ideas appeared in my head. Pictures that told complete stories. My stories, and they insisted I tell them. When I wasn’t working on the play, I spent time with friends in New York who were painters, including Peter Max, an acquaintance of mine from way back. One of the most successful artists in the world, he was a master of color. We met in his two-story Riverside Drive studio. Both floors were filled with his work. “I’m always drawing,” he told me. “I wake up and I can’t wait to get back at it.”
I was envious, and I knew what I needed to do. At the end of the play, I returned to California so stimulated and inspired that I literally walked into the house, dropped my luggage on the floor, went directly into my studio, picked up a paintbrush, and got to work. I didn’t stop painting until exhaustion forced me to take a break the next day.
Oddly enough, prior to leaving for New York six and a half months earlier, I had purchased new canvases and set one up on my easel. Everything was waiting for me when I returned. All I had to do was open the paint and start. It was like meeting an old lover again and finding the passion and excitement of being back together were still there and as strong and beautiful as ever. Except I wasn’t trysting with an old lover. I was meeting up with myself, the boy who had grown into a man, the man who had shut down this part of himself for nearly a decade, and now wanted only to paint.
This was me at midlife. Not having a crisis as much as a conversation. I heard Troy speak to me. “Life don’t owe you nothing. You owe it to yourself.” As I painted, as I looked deep into myself and found the stories I wanted to tell and needed to tell, I heard my own voice, and within that voice, one word kept repeating itself: Love.