The Mother of Black Hollywood: A Memoir
Jenifer Lewis
PROLOGUE
Dorothy Mae Lewis was not a woman to mess with. One day, when I was about six, I held Mama’s hand as we walked home from Miss Woods’s store, where Mama had bought a bottle of Coca-Cola. Well, out of nowhere, her boyfriend at the time, Jelly Bean, pulled up in his station wagon and called out for my mother, “Hey, Dorothy! C’mere.”
Now, my mother was pretty much the queen of Kinloch, Missouri, and the one thing you did not do is summon her to do anything, anywhere, at anytime. My mother ignored Jelly Bean.
He said, “Dorothy, you hear me talkin’ to you?”
She said, “Go on somewhere else, Jelly. Cain’t you see I’m with my baby?”
Jelly Bean then made the biggest mistake of his life. He pulled the car over to where Mama and I stood, reached out of the window, grabbed Mama’s right arm, and said, “You gonna talk to me right now, Dorothy.”
I was still holding her left hand tightly, aware of the time bomb that was about to explode. What I can tell you now is that it was all over in five seconds.
It ended with Jelly Bean speeding away and a trail of blood that led to the corner where the station wagon had taken a sharp right and disappeared. And as small as Kinloch was, we never saw Jelly Bean again. And y’all wanna wonder where I get it from.
ONE
BLACK-ISH TO GREENISH
After two weeks of intensely working out, I had lost not one fucking pound! Yet, ready or not, there I was, my first day on the set of black-ish. The show is what every actor dreams of—a prime-time hit on a national network. My first scene was with Morpheus from The Matrix—of course, I mean Laurence Fishburne, the brilliant actor who plays my ex-husband, Pops.
I was about to deliver my initial line. One would think that this moment would be fun, easy, even fabulous. I mean, after all, I had been doing television for what seemed like a hundred years—from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to Murphy Brown, from In Living Color to Friends, and on and on. But ten years had passed since I had worked consistently on the small screen.
Once again, the gods of television had summoned me back. Back to bring the Jenifer Lewis magic. Back to deliver the take-no-prisoners attitude and deep, rich tone that made mine one of the most recognizable voices in Hollywood. But I’ll be damned if now, at the moment of truth, I could remember one line of the script I had studied.
After 259 episodic television shows, 63 movies, and four Broadway shows, the great Jenifer Lewis could not remember one fucking line. I was a nervous wreck. No one on the black-ish set besides me knew it, though.
I asked for a moment and grabbed my script. As I sat down and put on my glasses, I knew I would be forgiven for the pause. After all, I was new to the set and the rest of the cast had already shot several episodes together.
Come on, Jenny, you can do this. I was not about to disappoint all these people—the cast and crew, the writers, the producers, and ABC/Disney, who had hired me without a single audition. To better focus, I took three deep breaths, finally got all the lines in my head, then whispered, Come on, Jenny, get up. Get your ass up and deliver.
In the days before, like a fool, I had read the Facebook comments about the announcement that I would be on black-ish—“Awww, shit, here come Jenifer Lewis!” “She my play-auntie y’all.” “That’s right. They got the Mother of Black Hollywood.” OMG, she’s fabulous. She’s this. She’s that. Now I felt like I had to live up to all that love. I couldn’t let it shake me.
I had to shut down all the internal noise and get in the moment of my character, Ruby Johnson. C’mon, pull yourself together, Miss Bachelor’s Degree in Theater Arts! I’d studied Stanislavski, Feldenkrais—and with the great Uta Hagen no less. Where did Ruby come from and what is her objective in this scene?
I had been working on Ruby. I wanted her to be a whole person—warm, grounded, smart, quirky, and very, very funny. A woman who loves her son (perhaps a bit too much), never cuts her daughter-in-law any slack, and who loves her grandbabies above all else.
And, of course, Ruby had to be fabulous! So again like another fool I’d said yes to the four-inch pumps—completely forgetting what they would do to my ever-present, aching plantar fasciitis. I stood there feeling fat. My right knee was throbbing. I felt old.
What was I doing here anyway? My thoughts flashed back to a few months earlier—when I had seriously considered retiring. I decided to treat myself to a much-needed vacation and jetted off to Europe to have some fun and ponder my life—not only my career, but also the fact that at age fifty-seven I was still single. Despite being engaged four times, I had never made it to the altar. Of course, I kept the rings.
I was off to Athens, where I boarded the Seven Seas, an exclusive luxury cruise ship. For three weeks it was just me, myself, and I, a little barefoot colored girl from poverty-stricken Kinloch, Missouri.
I had worn one of my huge straw hats, expensive dark shades (trying to be incog-Negro), and a muumuu. I extended my passport and ticket to the young steward. He then stretched his neck and peered under my hat. Even though he was Italian, he proceeded to do an Irish jig, and with no care for his job security, screeched in front of all the first-class passengers, “Jackie’s back!” He was referring to the title of the 1999 Lifetime movie in which I had starred.
News spread through the ship that a celebrity was on board. There was a knock at my door. It was my butler (yes, that barefoot little colored girl had a butler!), informing me I was invited to dine at the captain’s table. Though I hadn’t planned on it, I admit I enjoyed the celebrity treatment.
I basked in my luxury suite and lounged on my private balcony as we made our way around the Aegean, the Mediterranean, and the Adriatic, but my joy was tempered by the decision before me—to retire or not to retire. I still bristled from the recent disappointment of not being chosen for several roles I had wanted. I didn’t get Orange Is the New Black, but my dear friend Lorraine Toussaint did. I didn’t get Getting On, but my dear friend Niecy Nash did. I hated the fact that after forty years in the business, I still even had to audition. And damn, could it possibly be true that as a singer, I had never even recorded an album? On top of all that, I had just broken off another engagement. Okay, okay. Now I’m doing what my therapist, Rachel, would call “garbage collecting.” Stop bitching, Jenny!