A male voice said, “Give me back my head, bitch.” It was Tom, peering over my shoulder and reading the first line on the page. It was surprising to see him because big stars almost never come to hair and makeup with the rest of us. He had his own Gulf Stream trailer to dress in. “Is that in our scene? Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, “I thought you were reading a scene from Cast Away.” He sounded hurt. “You were getting ready to do a scene with me and you’re practicing for another project?” I was so embarrassed.
We got in rehearsal and I was nervous and over the top. He called me over and said, “Don’t say it if you don’t mean it.” In the next take, I got myself together and proceeded to do the hell out of the scene. I played the role of Tom’s boss at the FedEx facility where his character worked. In the scene, we’d gotten a call from Moscow that packages were not moving through to get to their destinations as they should.
We actors stood next to a conveyer belt. I heard “Action!” and said to Tom, “You go to Moscow.” As I did, boxes came up the conveyor belt. Tom, who was poised to get my goat, picked up a box, tossed it in my direction, and said, “Here’s your head, bitch!” Oh, we cut up on that set as if we had been raised on the same block. To this day, every time I see Tom, be it on the red carpet or at a restaurant, he teases me with, “Did you find your head yet, bitch?”
Filming Cast Away was mind-blowing. I learned so much working with Tom. And I realized that living in my show-business bubble, it had never occurred to me to think about how packages got from one place to the other. The operations of FedEx in real life are like a city, with ten zillion boxes, people, machines, and trucks. Who’d a thunk? I was blown away by that and by the fact that nearly all my scenes in Cast Away ended up on the cutting room floor.
THIRTEEN
JACKIE’S BACK!
I began taking writing classes for professional and personal reasons. I felt it was time for growth. I joined forces with my dear friends Mark Alton Brown and Dee La Duke to write a movie for me to star in. I shouldn’t even say we wrote it. Jackie’s Back! wrote itself. It was basically a compilation of the fevered, insane conversations we’d had for years. We came away with a mockumentary about Jackie Washington, a 1960s/70s-style R&B diva on the comeback.
The concept arose from Mark and I having watched a documentary about the singer Shirley Bassey called Have Voice, Will Travel. I love and adore Shirley Bassey. I pray every night to be able to hit the notes that bitch hits and I train my lungs constantly to hold notes longer than she does. Both are impossible.
In the documentary Shirley proclaimed multiple times that she was the greatest entertainer in the world. We wove that attitude, along with some aspects of my personality, into the Jackie Washington character. What distinguished Jackie from me most was that she would never doubt herself. She believed her own bullshit: that she was fabulous always and forever. I, on the other hand, might proclaim “I’m fabulous, I’m fabulous,” but then pull back and cry myself to sleep wracked with self-doubt.
Barry Krost, my manager at the time, tried to sell the script all over town. Lifetime picked it up and the one and only Robert Townsend was chosen to direct. All y’all need to know is that during the first meeting with the Lifetime executives, one of them raised her hand timidly and, referring to the script, asked, “What does ‘Cuth what? Thank you, no mo’ mean?” In his thick English accent, Barry replied, “Oh, darling, I honestly don’t know what it means, but when Jackie Washington says it, it’s quite clear.”
I found that producing a movie is a whole nother thing, very different from creating a stage production for one actor. In producing, the bottom line is money. I was fortunate that my friends put me, not compensation, first. We rallied a long list of greats to make cameo appearances: The first person I called was Whoopi. Now, something you guys don’t know—because I had become the entertainer’s entertainer, all the divas who love me sort of competed in claiming responsibility for my becoming a star. So, I was no fool. I played them against each other—with love, of course. I told Whoopi I had Bette. I told Bette I had Whoopi. I told Rosie I had Whoopi and Bette. I told Loretta I had Whoopi, Bette, and Rosie. Barry Krost got Dolly Parton and JoBeth Williams. Robert Townsend got Don Cornelius. I snatched Chris Rock just walking across the lawn at the Beverly Hills Hotel. If you look closely and listen, he has no idea what he’s talking about. What he’s saying doesn’t even make sense, but who cares? It was Chris Rock and he did it for Jenifer Lewis.
When they told me Tim Curry would be my co-star, all I could think of was him in that bustier and garter belt in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I proceeded to levitate off the ground. The shit was set in motion. Robert Townsend took a crew to the set of Girl, Interrupted and got Whoopi in costume as a nurse. I had been up for that part. Bitch. They went to New York and got Liza Minnelli. Unfuckingbelievable. Then, when the head of Lifetime, Laurette Hayden, called and told me her mother had agreed to do a cameo, I proceeded to jump as high as the Maasai in Ngorongoro. Her mother was, of course, the legendary actress Eva Marie Saint, Miss North by Northwest herself.
Then Jackie Collins agreed to say that Jackie Washington had died from choking on a chitlin. We got Kathy Najimy, Kathy Griffin, and Sean Hayes. When Diahann Carroll proclaimed she had built herself from the ground up and was calling her lawyer to sue Jackie for, whatever mind I had was lost. When Penny Marshall nasaled her way through her monologue, the gods came down from the heavens and blessed the entire production.
One theme of the movie is a corny double entendre. We named Jackie Washington’s youngest daughter Antandre, and then had Jackie ask her for a drink and make the obvious request: Ready, “Make it a double, Antandre!”
The environment on the set equaled one word—laughter. My favorite scene is when Jackie comes out of the house, drunk, and tells the detective, “Wait a minute,” so she can fix her hair for the cameras after stabbing Milkman, her husband, with an Afro pick. By the way, Milkman was played by the wonderful Richard Lawson, who later married Tina Knowles, Beyoncé’s mama. I actually went on one date with him. Shit, had I known Tina would be my competition, I’d-a worn a lower neckline! But seriously, Richard and I were no Jackie and Milkman. We became more like sister and brother, which is very cool.
In the movie when you see that Playboy spread with Jackie’s legs in a wide split, I just want y’all to know that’s my real body. I am a yoga and Pilates diva after all. And let’s not forget captain of the fucking cheerleading squad in high school.