21
I wasn’t going to be anyone’s first, second, or third choice for marriage advice, but I was the picture of a proud father as I guided my daughter slowly and tenderly around the dance floor at her own nuptials. Only Hanako could see the tears in my eyes. I was always emotional at family occasions, but this was next-level joy for me as the father of the bride. The wedding was in our backyard. Friends and family cheered when I walked Hanako down the aisle, not to Mendelssohn’s traditional wedding march or Pachelbel’s “Canon in D” but instead to Darth Vader’s theme, “The Imperial March.” It was perfect. It was out of this world.
My baby girl took my breath away in her wedding gown, and as far as I could tell, she had an even more profound effect on the groom, Liam Toohey. The two were college sweethearts. By the time they said their I do’s, they had dated through four years at Brown University and lived together another five years in New York. Liam asked my permission to marry Hanako one night when we were at a restaurant. “I love this girl,” I said. “If anything happens to her, you will feel my wrath.”
They laughed at my approximation of a tough guy, and after a moment of pretending I was insulted, I joined them. Now that my kids were grown up and on their own, I wasn’t fooling anyone. I was reminded of the time Hanako was in high school and I asked her about boys and dating and she said, “Daddy, I love you. But I’m not going to marry someone like you.” She kept her word. Liam was terrific. After their wedding, my mother squeezed my hand and whispered, “Daddy would’ve loved it.”
She was right. My parents had always put family first, and I tried to do the same even though I had conducted much of my life in an unorthodox way. But Teruko and I were still together, sharing our home and life in our own unique way. I’m sure we looked at each other the same way: Why are we still here together? However, after all these years, we were still together. We had our own way of approaching our lives. Mine was more of an artful improvisation. She was better organized, more deliberate, more of a mercenary, and not about to give up what she thought was hers. But as you get older, love changes, and relationships change, while family only gets more important.
Walking Hanako down the aisle and getting that first daddy’s dance, at her wedding in our backyard in Trousdale, 2000
My strong feelings about family compelled me to take a chance on a small indie film titled The Visit. This intimate, intense drama was about a jailed young Black man who comes down with AIDS while incarcerated and arranges a visit with his family in hope of mending long-simmering wounds. I read the script, then met with writer-director Jordan Walker-Pearlman and told him he’d written something powerful. I was ready to start work, but the young filmmaker still needed to raise money to make the picture. He asked if he could use my name to help.
Years ago I would have said no, but at this stage of my career, my perspective was open to some risk, and I told Jordan to go for it. I knew what it was like to be starting out and filled with ideas and ambition. I also wanted to make this movie. I got so caught up in it when I read the script, and I wanted to see where this character would take me.
“It’s about love,” Jordan explained. “Every character feels it, struggles to express it, and is ultimately renewed by it.”
“I felt it,” I said.
“The prison is a metaphor,” he said.
“Of the mind?”
“The emotions they’ve kept locked up.”
Jordan was a thoughtful, serious young man half my age. His own life was as fascinating as those he wanted to put on the screen in his feature film debut. He was a White Jewish kid whose Black grandmother had raised him in Harlem. His uncle was actor Gene Wilder. He looked like a younger version of his uncle, yet most of the stories he told about growing up in the ’70s and ’80s were in and around the places I knew in Harlem. I related to his perspective. It wasn’t Black or White. It was human.
Once he had financing, he assembled an impressive cast, with Hill Harper in the lead role as the imprisoned young man, with key supporting roles going to Marla Gibbs, Phylicia Rashad, Rae Dawn Chong, Obba Babatundé, and Talia Shire. Prior to filming, he brought cast members together in small groups and had us talk about our characters rather than practice our lines. Marla Gibbs said she’d never been to a rehearsal where she didn’t read the script. Hill and I were instructed to work on our relationship.
Within minutes, the two of us were arguing with each other. The approach created tension that was real, and at the same time I remember looking into Hill’s eyes as if they reflected a maze I had to navigate before we could hug. My character had to get to that same place with his son and himself, only he had to do it while visiting his son in jail. There he had to figure out what had happened to them, and why.
It required brutal honesty, a courageous honesty, and that’s what I loved about this film. A father and son getting to their truth, working through generational differences, and challenging each other in a way I hadn’t seen before in a movie about the contemporary Black experience—and the Black family experience.
Hill’s character was in jail for a crime he said he didn’t commit. Yet while there, he admitted to other infractions. My character insisted on having his son’s respect before he could begin to breach their divide. We filmed at the L.A. County Jail, and the gritty environment added to the intensity of the performance. At one point I reached across the table and swung at Hill. My heart raced as I unloaded on him. “You didn’t get born deserving something,” I said. “You’re a man first, Alex. But a man knows how to take responsibility. We have to take responsibility for our own lives, Alex.”
In the fall of 2000, the film made the rounds at film festivals, where it was well received. I attended several screenings, and each time, no matter which part of the movie I walked in on, I was gutted by the raw emotion on the screen. I was gratified to see others react the same way. It wasn’t an easy movie to watch. But when awards season rolled around in early 2001, The Visit won the National Board of Review’s Freedom of Expression Award and received several Independent Spirit Awards nominations, including Best First Feature, Best Actor for Hill, and Best Supporting Actor for me, which was a rewarding surprise.
At the awards ceremony, the Best Supporting Actor statue went deservedly to Willem Dafoe for his work in Shadow of the Vampire. But I felt recognized when the room filled with applause even before presenters Gabriel Byrne and Holly Hunter finished mentioning my name as a nominee. It let me know that in a room full of peers and filmmakers, I’d made an impression. Not only had my work over forty years endured, but I was also adding to it in a meaningful way.
In 2001, I was in my second season on TNN’s 18 Wheels of Justice, and the work had me commuting regularly to San Diego, where the weekly action series shot. During the first season, I spent many of the long commutes down the coast from my home in Los Angeles and back pondering my fascinating series co-star, convicted Watergate conspirator–turned–talk radio host G. Gordon Liddy. The former lawyer, FBI agent, and Richard Nixon operative was extraordinarily bright and equally scary.
There was a dark side to his intelligence. He didn’t hide it, either. That’s what drew me to him. It was like getting close to a fire. But not too close.
Now, in the second season, my mind was elsewhere. I often spent those two-and-a-half-hour drives thinking about my mother. At eighty-five years old, she’d become more sedentary, which upset me. My whole life she had always been an energetic and active woman. But I could see the light gradually dimming. I don’t know how it is with other people, but I never thought of my parents as old until one day they weren’t the same. It had happened with my dad’s leukemia, and now it was happening with my mother.
By 2002, my mother began to speak about not being a burden. It was unlike her, but she knew her body was failing as one problem after another sent her to the doctor. She hated that, this once-vibrant woman using her precious time and energy to get to doctor appointments. My mother was incredibly strong and spiritual, and I think one day she said “Enough” and prepared herself to leave. Then, as she weakened further, she wanted to leave. She found solace reading her Bible and visiting with me and Lady and her grandchildren.
She enjoyed reminiscing and always told me that Lady Sings the Blues was her favorite of all my movies. She also looked ahead to no longer feeling weak or being in pain. Such talk would bother me, but she was calm and accepting. She believed her beloved Jehovah was going to take care of her on the next leg of her journey.
At some point, tired of visiting the doctor for this and that ailment and feeling like she could no longer be patched and propped up with more pills, Mommy stopped taking her blood pressure medication, and in 2003, she suffered a massive stroke. Every day I sat next to her bed in the hospital, holding her hand, talking to her, remembering and recounting our life together, wondering if I was getting through, if she could hear me, wondering where she was going to next, not wanting her to go, selfishly hoping and praying for her to come out of that deep sleep, and knowing she didn’t want to come out.
She was my best friend, my first girlfriend, the person who understood me better than anyone else. I couldn’t imagine my world without her being present in it, without hearing her voice, without her calling me up or sending me a note. I already missed her. I suspected when I left this realm I would meet up with her again, which was why my last words to her were not “goodbye” but rather “I love you.”
Within a week, she was gone. She died surrounded by family, knowing she was loved and adored.
She wasn’t our only loss. A few years later, my sister’s health also declined. Having battled rheumatic heart problems all her life, her health was always more precarious than it appeared, especially now that we were in our mid-sixties. Her smile concealed the constant pain of severe rheumatoid arthritis. Her hands were gnarled by bone spurs and often swollen and burning, making something as ordinary as using a fork and knife a triumph of willpower. Then she was hit with cancer.
She had amazing resiliency. I wondered how she managed, and then I’d look into her eyes and see the depth of her faith, a faith that gave her strength and a sense of peace that brought the beauty of her soul to the surface, so that despite the physical state of her body, what I saw, what all of us who loved her saw, was that beauty.
Even though we were twins, it had always been that way, with Lady stronger, smarter, and wiser. She’d arrived first, clearing the way for me. She’d watched out for me at school. She’d been my nurse and protector on the playground. She’d corrected me when I called myself stupid. She’d ushered me to social events. She’d been my lifelong cheerleader. And as she constantly, almost annoyingly told me, she prayed for me.
After she was hospitalized, it was my turn to pray for her. Lady’s three children and I sat with her every day. We watched the strength drain from her. We saw her weaken. And we gradually felt her letting go. I held her hand and recited the Lord’s Prayer the way I had done when she was a child stricken with rheumatic fever. “Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done…”
Even though I still believed in the power of prayer—the ability of people coming together in positive thought and energy to alter a situation—I didn’t get the miracle I wanted. Seated at her bedside, I told Lady how much she meant to me, and I felt her hand squeeze mine. Her faith was very powerful, and she let me know she was at peace.
Still, I had a hard time facing the fact that she was going to leave us. We were twins. It was never just one of us. It was always Sonny and Lady. Even as adults, we were Sonny and Lady. I didn’t want to let that go. At the end, I had no choice. But I couldn’t hold her hand and watch her pass. She knew that, too. In our own way, we had to let each other go.
I got up and sat in a chair directly outside her room. Her children were beside her. “Make sure Uncle Billy’s okay,” she told her daughter.
Then she was gone.
Once again, I found comfort and meaning in work. It was my second feature with Jordan Walker-Pearlman, a 2005 drama titled Constellation. I played an artist who returns to his small southern hometown to deal with the estate of his recently deceased sister and the effect her interracial love affair fifty years earlier had on her and the relatives and friends who show up for the funeral. My character paints portraits of these individuals, and they work through the hurt and anger they’ve carried for decades, finding the love that is at the core of their ties to each other.
Despite a veteran cast led by Gabrielle Union, Lesley Ann Warren, Zoe Saldana, David Clennon, Hill Harper, and Rae Dawn Chong, the movie was too slow to be commercial, and after screening at film festivals, it faded into the recesses of On Demand libraries. But the film’s message stayed with me: People passed on, but their love lasted. Death was a finite experience. Love was infinite.
That might sound clichéd, but to me, it was true. My entire immediate family was gone—my grandmother, my father, my mother, and my sister—and yet not a day went by when I didn’t feel their love.
In 2007, I turned seventy years old. A few days after my birthday, I sat in a hospital room at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and said goodbye to my dear friend Roscoe Lee Browne. His eyes were closed. The cancer had made him extremely weak. I kissed the top of his head, as I liked to do, and said, “I love you.” Life continued. The past stretched out the way the future once did, long and wide, except the blanks were filled in. I found that I didn’t worry the way I once did about what might be next. I enjoyed being in the present.
A long lunch? Another glass of wine? Sure, thank you.
I was lucky to have only one issue with getting older. When my daughter broke the good news to me that she was pregnant, I didn’t know whether I wanted my grandbaby to call me Billy or Billy Dee. I thought about it a lot during the nine and a half months I watched Hanako’s belly grow and listened to her and her husband, Liam, plan for their baby, which was the opposite of the way I’d been when I became a father. Then Finnegan arrived, and four years later, in 2011, Hanako gave birth to a precious little girl, Lucie. Mother and daughter and big brother and dad were elated. And so was Grandpa.
Yes, Grandpa. By then, Finnegan was talking nonstop, and with my coaching, he had learned to call me by my favorite name. It wasn’t Billy or Billy Dee, as I’d originally planned. It was Grandpa. Eventually, Lucie did the same. And I loved it. Although I was, as one critic put it, three decades past heartthrob status, I mostly didn’t mind getting older. The one thing I missed more than everything else was saying the words “Mommy” and “Daddy.” I missed the warmth and comfort that came from saying “Thanks, Daddy” and “Good night, Mommy.” But hearing my babies say “Grandpa” was a gratifying replacement.
Grandpa sounded perfect.