What do black women want? And what does Hollywood want black women to be? To both questions, Angela Bassett is a potential answer. So far, the thirty-seven-year-old actress has portrayed Malcolm X’s embattled but noble wife, Betty Shabazz, in Spike Lee’s “X.” She has impersonated Michael Jackson’s long-suffering but noble and religious mother, Katherine, in the television series “The Jacksons: An American Dream.” She has also been nominated for an Oscar, for her portrayal of Ike Turner’s battered but indomitable and noble wife, Tina, in Brian Gibson’s “What’s Love Got to Do with It.” And, in recent months, she has been seen as the embittered but noble and stylish Bernadine in the film version of the novelist Terry McMillan’s “Waiting to Exhale”—a film that, despite its questionable artistic merit, was Twentieth Century Fox’s most successful Christmas release, not least because of the emotional identification that black women across the country felt for “Exhale” ’s four long-suffering, religious, and stylish black female characters.
“Those sisters who loved the movie gave ‘Exhale’ parties,” says the actress Loretta Devine, who, as the overweight, religious, and pleasure-seeking Gloria Johnson, achieves what is arguably the film’s finest performance. “They rented out theatres in small towns. They grab me on the street. But when I go to see casting people out in L.A. it’s like they never saw the film—like they can’t face the fact that the story of four black girls did well.”
This is not entirely the case when casting agents and directors focus on Bassett. While she has yet to account for a film’s financial success, her dignified, alert, and earnestly emotive screen presence does generate audience sympathy. And she appeals especially to that segment of the moviegoing public (black women, white housewives, lesbians, and married men) who are not just fetishizing her striking upper-body musculature but are responding to the subtext of her performances—a subtext that includes her struggle to reinvent Hollywood’s view of black women as something other than wisecracking or doleful martyrs, their hair stiff with brilliantine and the funk of subjugation.
Even so, one of the reasons for the film industry’s interest in Bassett—and the reason that she’s the only black actress the industry supports besides Whoopi Goldberg, who doesn’t count, since Whoopi Goldberg is an industry unto herself—is her blackness. It is a blackness that doesn’t threaten, because Bassett’s somewhat strident self-respect satisfies the industry’s moral yearnings. Bassett is not loud; she does not dismiss her male co-stars with lines like “Nigger, please!”; she is not a menacing or haughty Negress who projects her disdain by rolling her eyes. She is not too idiosyncratic. She is not fat. “Onscreen, she’s Anita Hill,” a friend once observed. This may explain the blank, kind face that producers and agents and writers and directors reflexively put on when they’re asked to discuss Bassett, who lives in Los Angeles, where the trend is political correctness in all things—as was evidenced last year by Disney’s frantic search for a “real” Native American actress to be the speaking voice behind its cartoon image of Pocahontas.
As a by now commodified spectacle, Bassett faces an interesting but thorny public question; to wit, how black is Angela Bassett? In conversation, she indulges in many forms of black American colloquial speech, in the accents of her native St. Petersburg, Florida—“Mm-hmm,” “Girlfriend,” “You know what I’m sayin’?”—and with a jocularity that her formidable control doesn’t allow her to show onscreen, where she often portrays characters who never refer to their ethnicity in the company of white people (and hence of the camera). “Now, y’all know I can speak proper English,” Bassett joked when I met her. “I’m ed-u-cated. My mama would be shocked to hear me speaking in this down-home way to a journalist. But I’m so comfy.”
In her acting, Bassett does not project comfort. She received her M.F.A. in theatre from the Yale School of Drama in 1983 (after giving up on business as an undergraduate there, because, as she explained to me, she couldn’t subdue statistics), and she has mannered, cool technique. This, combined with her enticing black-girl looks (dusky skin; perky nose; heart-shaped mouth with full but moderate lips; sharp, slanted eyes), accounts for her daunting screen persona. She is an anomaly in an industry that for the past hundred years has been persistent in its construction of the black girl as Something Freaky or Something Else. “You have to let those titties fly if you want the cameras to roll” is how the black actress and singer Diahnne Abbott once put it to me. Bassett has never been a vide-ho, a gangsta bitch, or a homegirl. She has enough clout to have scripts and various other projects that were originally written for white stars “reconceptualized” for her, because, as her manager, Doug Chapin, told me, “she has the ability not only to portray emotions, which a lot of good actors have, but to have the audience experience them with her.”
Bassett is the first black American actress to become a generically attractive crossover star since the seventies, when Diana Ross was, as Jamaica Kincaid once wrote, “the last of the black white girls.” And, as a black female star who acts, Bassett redefines what a black diva is. She is no longer someone who just sings or tap-dances or dopes or flips out on white people when she feels like it. (“I’m a princess, but a nice princess,” Bassett says.) Bassett’s distance makes some white actresses of her generation look foolish, overwrought, and plain, partly because what will always make black female performers startling onscreen is their physical difference from white women. “I’m not a big fan of the silly-white-girl ‘Tee-hee, can I give you head?’ school of acting,” she says, with a deep laugh. “When I look at someone acting, I want to learn somthing.”
Her co-star in “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” the sexually compelling Laurence Fishburne, says, “She’s one of the great actresses to come along in the last twenty-five years. Race is not an issue.” But one filmmaker I talked to had a more complex view. “Listen, Angela Bassett is pretty” he told me. “Movie stars aren’t about acting—certainly not anymore. They’re about models who speak their lines. If Angela didn’t do her whole black-woman-struggle thing, she’d be another blonde winning an Oscar. But because she’s pretty and an excellent actress and black the Hollywood guys are forced to see her differently. Her presence preys on liberal guilt.”
Despite her perceived integrity within the film industry, Bassett is still a performer; she can’t always control how she’s used, and has not escaped being made stereotypical on occasion. In Mary J. Blige’s video for the current hit song “Not Gon’ Cry,” from the “Waiting to Exhale” soundtrack (which has sold almost four million copies to date), images from Bassett’s performance in the film are edited to make her look like a righteous black bitch. But when I first saw “Exhale” this past winter, it was her character’s anger over her husband’s leaving her for a white woman (and his not marching in Washington to atone for anything) that elicited the loudest cheers from the audience, made up largely of black females. They were in love with Bassett’s ability to express something other than depression.
The idea of Hollywood—and the reality of the studio system—came from Jews (Goldwyn, Mayer, the Warner brothers), for whom assimilation, which was possible in the West, became the social goal. Blacks who appeared in films during the early days of the studio system—women like Hattie McDaniel and Butterfly McQueen and Louise Beavers—bore the burden of ethnicity as taboo, not only for blacks but for the Jewish moguls, who wanted to lampoon the pain their own ethnicity had caused them. The Mammy was “My Yiddische Mama” in blackface. Dorothy Dandridge was a goyische dream made even more forbidden because she was black. Cicely Tyson was the embodiment of thirties leftist Jewish politics—a dignified integrationist, poor but articulate. Diahann Carroll was the idea of integration made banal. And Whoopi Goldberg’s name—along with aspects of her public and private persona—represented the loopy convergence of New York Jewish humor and black sass.
But, despite film history, Bassett went to Hollywood in 1988 to start a career in the movies. She was possessed of a bright-eyed faith that attracted people in the industry (the spiritual if not actual progeny of immigrants), and her unthreatening ambition confirmed the industry’s notion of itself as something worth aspiring to—an immigrant’s Valhalla. Bassett says, “New York actors would say, ‘I’m not going until they call.’ It occurred to me they don’t do that for black girls. They’re gonna fly you from New York, house you, give you a per diem, provide you with a chauffeur? That could take forever. I think I’ve got to go there and beat on the door like the woman who beat on the door of the judge’s chamber until he got sick of it and said, ‘What do you want?!’ And she said, ‘Let me in here’ And that’s what I did.”
Her first big role was in John Singleton’s “Boyz N the Hood,” a film that impressed critics and studio executives alike, because it created a new genre—the extended hip-hop video with a narrative, featuring cranky black girls sporting elaborate Nefertiti-like hairdos. The plot, such as it was, concerned black-male inner-city angst (and guns) and black inner-city sexual tension (and guns). In “Boyz,” Bassett effectively portrayed a mother who aspired to the middle class while trying to stay “real”; she was especially imperious and charming in a scene with Fishburne, where she commanded him to “sit your ass down,” and then said, “Now it’s my time to talk. . . . Don’t think you’re special. You may be cute, but you’re not special.” (Pause.) “Drink your café au lait; it’s on me.”
“Angela is a down woman and actress, but I would say she never plays stereotypes,” Forest Whitaker, who directed “Exhale,” says. “I always wanted her for Bernadine. Angela’s a very real African-American woman.” Neither Whitaker nor any of Bassett’s other directors could say what, exactly, constitutes a real black performance. Terry McMillan says, “We have a different kind of vulnerability. Angela’s aura is about dignity and pride.” She adds, “But I do think she needs to do a comedy. To loosen up.” In any case, Bassett appeared in “Malcolm X,” “The Jacksons,” and “What’s Love Got to Do with It” in relatively rapid succession. “Back to back, Angela got all three roles that every black actress in America wanted,” recalls Loretta Devine, a Michael Bennett alumna and “Dreamgirls” star. “You could hate her if you weren’t working yourself.”
It is hard to conceive of “Waiting to Exhale” ’s being made before Angela Bassett became Angela Bassett. “I like the underdog, women who struggle,” Bassett says, and “Waiting to Exhale” essentially divided Bassett’s black-lordy-lord-struggling-woman screen presence into four characters. Each was shot badly; indeed, Bassett, Whitney Houston, Devine, and Lela Rochon were all shot as if they had the same skin tone—as if the cinematographer and the director hadn’t seen them as separate women at all.
But Bassett survived “Waiting to Exhale” (just as she has survived other recent artistic disasters, like Wes Craven’s “A Vampire in Brooklyn,” and financial disasters, like Kathryn Bigelow’s “Strange Days”) because of the indelible impression her performance as Tina Turner had made. In terms of audience appeal—and despite a mediocre script, bad styling, and amateurish direction—Bassett’s performance can be compared to Diana Ross’s in “Lady Sings the Blues,” an equally bad film. Like Ross, Bassett was forced past her parameters: she transcended the rigidity of her training and appeared to express emotion without thinking. A lot of white women took a kind of masochistic delight in how Bassett-as-Turner coped with a dose of male brutality and emerged as a star rather than a feminist. (The comedian Sandra Bernhard expresses this best in Martin Scorsese’s “King of Comedy,” where, as a rich, hysterically cloistered Jewish girl, she literally captures the object of her affection; as he sits tied up before her, she says, “I want to be black. I wish I was Tina Turner dancing through the room—‘Wooo!’ ”)
Nevertheless, “What’s Love” was not an entirely pleasant experience for Bassett. “The film had to come out during the time of Tina’s world tour, so we were rushed,” Bassett recalls. “That meant I was working twenty hours a day, which I can. But you need a little stroke every once in a while. If it hadn’t been for Laurence Fishburne saying ‘The girl almost fell asleep on the road getting to the set—can you-all get her a driver?’ and my girlfriend Pam Tyson coming to my trailer and giving me two minutes to get it all out—scream, cry—and saying ‘You ain’t gonna quit now, is you?’ . . . Of course, we don’t quit. Can’t. So you catch your breath. Then you got to deal with the director saying, ‘Tina’s ass is higher than yours, could you do something about it?’ ”
When the film was released, many of the posters didn’t show Tina Turner—and by extension, Angela Bassett—as black but as a line drawing floating in white space. Apparently, Turner’s race (and Angela Bassett’s considerably darker skin) might have dissuaded white moviegoers from seeing the film. “Marketing people, they’re some other kind of people,” Bassett says, nearly smiling.
Bassett and her older sister, D’nette, were raised by their single mother in a housing project in St. Petersburg, where everyone helped watch the girls while Mrs. Bassett was out working for the state’s juvenile-welfare board. “My mother and father met in Harlem,” Bassett says. “I hope he’s in Heaven now. When it didn’t work out between them, she went back to Florida. You know, as a young girl, I couldn’t have too much fun. My mother pushed.” Bassett explains that her mother didn’t want her daughters duplicating any aspect of her single-mother experience. She encouraged them to succeed in areas where she’d once had ambitions of her own (“She’s melodramatic,” Bassett says), and instilled their drive toward excellence with comments such as “I don’t have any average children.”
Like most black women who grew up in matriarchal households, Bassett has her strongest alliances with other black women, especially actresses who, as her close friend the actress Pamala Tyson puts it, “don’t pose a threat to one another.” In the mid-eighties, Bassett and Tyson met regularly with Cheryl Rogers and Kim Staunton to have what they called Girlfriend Nights. They would cook and hang out and laugh; they were essentially having pre-“Waiting to Exhale” parties. And one thing they had in common, like the women in “Exhale,” was their religious faith. “We all came from a Christian background,” Tyson says. “We’re not afraid to put Him first.” She goes on, “It was interesting. We almost never talked about the industry or bashed the industry. It was a relief not to talk about it.”
Tyson, who was in “What’s Love” and has appeared in the film “Seven” and a number of theatre pieces, seems more alert to the machinations of the film industry than Bassett, who maintains an almost defensive innocence toward most things (including her romantic life, about which she is so discreet it seems a nonsubject). “Angie is shy and I’m not,” Tyson says, laughing. “At the end of the day, you better have your friend to watch your back, ’cause Twentieth Century Fox and Warner Brothers don’t.”
In black Hollywood, everyone who works—Bassett, Fishburne, Devine, Ving Rhames—is a sibling. And the protectiveness that the actors and directors feel toward one another has everything to do with learning how to survive the insults inherent in being asked, at some point, in that distinctly visual business, to modify their Negro features for the camera. If you are not Whitney Houston, you are, in effect, too dark, or your ass is too big. “Physical is what they think of first, all the time,” Bassett says of white shortsightedness. But Bassett’s image now qualifies as a model for palatable blackness.
In the meantime, she is aware that “the air is mighty thin at the top of the mountain.” So she prays. She prays for the black women who go to see her in the movies; she prays for better parts; she prays to maintain her close and intuitive working relationship with Laurence Fishburne, with whom she would like to do “Macbeth.” Just now, she is beginning to think about producing her own projects, but she doesn’t see herself as a script doctor, and, in her guilelessness, can rarely attach a director’s name to a film. (“You got to give me an actors name. Now, I like ‘Babe’!”) But Bassett’s innocence has clearly been a means of survival, too. “My auntie, whom I respect a great deal, told me not to waste a Yale education on theatre,” Bassett recalls. “She said, ‘I watch television. There’s nobody that looks like you on TV on a regular basis. And eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner is regular. Shelter is regular.’ But my mother said, ‘I don’t care what you do! No matter what! Just learn something. It’ll be all right. You just wake up and open your ears, you’re going to learn something.’ ” ♦
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