Friends: A Love Story (24 page)

One of the highlights of the trip was meeting Nelson Mandela, who visited with us for a half-hour lunch one day. Since my late teens I'd heard the story of how this lawyer had endured twenty years of imprisonment (he had been given a life sentence) for defying the apartheid government and fighting white domination. Over the years he had been made offers that would have freed him in exchange for compromising his principles. He'd refused. Finally, in 1990 he was released with his integrity intact. I had such a sense of pride in what he—a black man—had accomplished with his sacrifice. Someone who had lived so sacrificially was too much for me to fathom; I certainly couldn't imagine it in my own life. When you meet someone of that importance, of that stature, you never know how you're going to react. Are you going to gravitate toward them? Are you going to hold back but think,
“OH, MY GOD!”
I didn't know how I'd react, and there was so much anticipation. First we were waiting, waiting and anticipating, anticipating, that he was coming, he's coming, then he's here, he's here. Then he walks through the door! When I saw those eyes, that sweet face, that hair, that stature—that history of all he had done that I had been aware of for so long—my whole body just flew over to him. It was uncontrollable, an impulse. I just threw my arms around him. “Oh, my God.” I just hugged him and cried and embraced him. I said, “I love you, I love you….” He hugged me back saying, “Daughter, daughter….” Delroy was kind enough to suggest that I sit next to him at lunch. “Angela, take a seat,” he said as he pulled out a chair for me. I will always be grateful for the group's kindness for that; I had wanted to sit next to him but would have been too shy to ask. As we sat eating our bread and butter, Mr. Mandela told a story about two men from different places who sat around a fire and somehow by the time they left they understood each other. “That's what artists do,” he told us. “They bring stories and human conditions to the world.” He allowed us to take pictures with him. Then he was gone. It was a very memorable interaction. Shortly thereafter he won the election and became the first democratically elected president of South Africa. From all my incredible experiences on that trip, I realized that with everything I had going for me, there was nothing I shouldn't be able to do.

By my midthirties, my work had taken me to Europe, South Africa and Japan. I'd learned that I loved to go places and see how other people live, to actually experience all these places I'd read about, heard about, dreamed about, seen in movies. I was also fascinated by people who would leave their culture and families to move to a completely different place where they don't speak the language. It had been enough for me to move from New York to California! But I loved going to visit and, when possible, trying to get to the nucleus of the place—not to stay on the periphery but to really get a sense of what it must
be like to live there. Because I have an appreciation of the differences of people, I like to meet brand-new people. I like to soak up the humanity that exists all over the world. I think it's lovely and amazing. So I started to travel to places like the Virgin Islands with a boyfriend, to St. Martin when the comedian Sinbad did his first comedy thing, and to Paris and Rome. And then I enjoyed coming home.

Back in California I had been renting a nice apartment for all this time but really wanted to buy a house. After growing up in the projects, I had dreamed of living in and owning a house for my entire life. I asked my accountant if he thought I was financially secure enough yet. He told me I had the means to purchase a house, but didn't quite have enough money to maintain it. So I bought my first condo instead!

 

I also began to pay attention to my love life. I was thirty-five and wanted to get married and have a family.

By now both Jean and Lynn were married. Jean had married Vic, her college sweetheart, who went into the army. Jean and Vic, in turn, introduced Lynn to Al, one of Vic's army buddies. Lynn and Al got married. To this day both my sisters have wonderful marriages—they picked wonderful men! Straight up and down, stable, attentive and warm men. Over the years I would go to visit my sisters on the different military bases where their husbands were stationed and just be in awe of them as women. They are wonderful with their children, who, of course, I think are beautiful. I remember sitting under the beautiful, crystal-clear blue sky in Hawaii or Utah or wherever and just observing what wonderful mothers they were. I'd watch them with their children—telling them what to do in firm but loving voices, how sweet they were, how easily everyone laughed, just how delightful their laughter sounded. How much fun they had with their children; yet the children were well behaved. My heart would feel warm and full. I have so
much respect for the strength of their families and marriages. I wanted that for myself.

Before
What's Love
I'd had a degree of anonymity. I hadn't realized that I had anonymity because I was trying to become known so I could get more and better work, but I had the benefit of anonymity just the same. I hadn't thought about how being well known would impact on my life, my relationships or how I met men. Previously I was meeting guys on relatively equal ground: I don't know you and you don't know me, or I have a job and you have a job, or I'm relatively successful and you're relatively successful, too. After starring in a movie that resonated so strongly in popular culture, overnight it became hard to meet somebody where I didn't know them, they didn't know me and we were both starting at square one. Dating suddenly became very strange.

Over the next couple of years I dated a series of men—short-timers, I called them, since none of the relationships lasted more than three to six months—as I tried to find the man who would one day become my husband. Some of it's kind of humorous now, though it was frustrating, disappointing and sometimes painful at the time. I went out with a couple of guys who thought they were starting at square twenty in our relationship because they'd seen my work or heard such-and-such thing about me. They seemed to think that I had the same characteristics—the same strength or compassion or integrity—that a character I had played in a movie may have exhibited. I felt like, “I know this may sound crazy, but please ignore the pink elephant in the middle of the living room. You may know my work, but you don't really know
me.
”

A couple of guys wanted me to behave like the characters I'd played or had fantasies about me. I couldn't fulfill them. That wasn't fun for me. It didn't give me any satisfaction.

“Should I pretend to your face that I'm kissing someone other than you?” I asked one suitor who wanted to pretend he
was out with a movie character. “How would you like that—when I kiss you, I'm not kissing you, I'm kissing Casanova?”

When he greeted me, one guy called my by the names of the characters I'd played.

“I'm not Katherine Jackson or Betty Shabazz or Tina, I'm Angela!” I'd say.

There was one guy who seemed to be impressed with the celebrity factor, that he was dating “Angela Bassett.” He liked being seen with me in public, to go to every event, the swirl of that “fabulous life.” Well, all of those events may be exciting to someone who isn't exposed to them on a daily basis, but when you do them all the time, they sometimes get a little tiresome—the hair, the makeup, the look, the dress, the smiling for the camera. I'm very social, but I can be quiet, reflective and shy, too. I just love to sit and have meaningful conversations with people, where we can just let down our guard and share—away from the noise, away from the swirl of activity. I like to feel I've walked away from a conversation having learned something about someone else or that I got some insight into an aspect of life I hadn't thought about before. But he'd badger me to go to these events until I said, “Okay, okay!”

Once he invited me to accompany him to the wedding of a woman I didn't know. I declined because I didn't want my celebrity to upstage the bride on her special day—especially a bride who didn't even know me. He insisted. I refused. Another day he read out loud a review of my work I'd told him I didn't want to hear (I thought it would be disparaging). The review was fine, but his behavior was like a slap in the face. It let me know that he didn't care about my comfort or needs. I was through with him but he kept calling.

“I was going to ask you to marry me.”

You were going to get a no! I thought to myself. I was glad he lived out of town.

Another guy seemed to have gotten a kick out of pursuing
me—and, oh, the pursuit was nice; who doesn't want to be pursued? He was blowing up my phone. We were talking a couple of times a day, staying up late talking. But after I was captured—after we had sex—he suddenly lost interest, the game was over. His interest began to wane. The scale tipped and I was calling him more often than he was calling me. When I stopped calling then, guess what? He started calling again. I knew to move on. But I realized that if I hadn't slept with him, I wouldn't have cared or felt insecure by his lack of attention.

One guy I went out with had children from a prior relationship. At first that was fine. I understood that as you get older, people's lives are more complex. But I learned that when you deal with men who've already had children, you don't just get the children; you also get the mother of their children. Then you may get children being used as pawns. Or wages being garnisheed. My sister Linda shared how she had reconnected with her high-school sweetheart who by then had two children. She “loved him to life” so they dated for a while, but she knew herself well enough to know that she wanted her own husband and her own children. She didn't want to start a family with someone who had children living in another household. She didn't want him getting a call that his kids were sick and having to go but still having children with her. She didn't want a man who was torn between two homes. After listening to her I realized I couldn't deal with that, either. Deep in my heart I had never wanted to have a “half” anything in my family. I grew up in a family where it was like, “I have three sisters—no, I have four sisters. Well, I grew up with one sister, but I have two older sisters—we have different mothers. And I do have another sister, Lisa, whom I met at my father's funeral, but I don't know where she is now, in the entire world.” Now, I love all my sisters, and families that are made up as mine is are just fine. And if you love someone and that's the situation, fine. I just didn't want it for my own family—the family I was going to create. I wanted
to be the most important person in someone's life; I wanted my husband to be there emotionally; I wanted all the family's resources—emotional, financial, time, whatever—to stay on one plate. I began to think more and more about why it made sense for me to have one husband and sex only within marriage.

During this time, though I dated a couple of guys pretty consistently over the course of several months, I couldn't really call any of them a boyfriend. They were not labeling it that, didn't want me to, either, and were not indicating by word or deed that that was the case. On more than one occasion, I found myself sitting in the movie theater wondering why our arms were so near each other yet he wasn't holding my hand. Wondering, “What's going on?” or “Why is he pulling back?” or “Why can't I just grab his hand?” or “I think there is something strange here.” I'd go through all these gymnastics and machinations in my head. In the meantime I'd miss the movie.

As I experienced disappointment after disappointment, I realized just how much I wanted to be in a serious relationship. I began to wonder why I wasn't. I liked men an awful lot. I found them fascinating! I wanted to get married. I
believed
I would get married. I wanted a to have a family. And on the surface it seemed that I was dating good guys—I would think the world of them. Yet somehow it felt like I kept dating the same person over and over: exciting, passionate and nice enough to start out with, but unavailable emotionally, and, sometimes, I would learn, taken. I wanted out of this limbo lifestyle that made me feel insecure. No matter how I tried to fix the relationship, work it, squeeze into the space, it seemed like the Lord kept putting up roadblocks, saying this person needed to leave my life. “Out! Out! Out!” My love life was going nowhere. I wanted to stop hitting this brick wall.

So when I was about thirty-seven I decided it was time that I engaged in some serious introspection. I was old enough to know that the only constant in a relationship is you. If you
keep dating the same types of people, you will end up experiencing the same results. You attract people who are at your level. If you want to attract a better class of person, you have to be a better class of person. I realized I needed to stay at home and work on me.

 

As I reflected, I considered all my previous experiences with men. My mother had told me that “I was the prize,” and I knew I had some of her strength, morality and resiliency. Yet I felt that I was at somewhat of a disadvantage since I hadn't had the benefit of a daddy's love or the best male role models at home. Yes, I had Papa and some of the wonderful men in my community. But I hadn't had a good father figure to model for me what was right and how a man should treat me. I felt like there were a lot of relationships I thought I might have passed on if I'd had that. I thought I would have been stronger in my no's. I realized the love and validation I had been looking for from men—a lot of them couldn't give it. There had been a time when I was younger that I had been trying not to be inexperienced—when I wanted to gloat with my girlfriends: “How was he? What did you use—whipped cream, honey?”—that kind of stuff. The guys I had been dealing with had their own agendas and experiences, too. They were testing and trying and discovering—finding out who they were as men, finding out who they were sexually, finding out what kind of woman they wanted. Some of them may have been given lessons about needing to rack up notches on their belt, or get experience or about not settling down. But I was older and wiser now. I wanted to settle down and get married. I needed to know, on a day-to-day basis, what exactly did a “good man” look and act like? What did I need to do differently to sort through the fact that everyone's nice in the beginning, to find a man who was faithful, trustworthy and committed to me? All along I had assumed I knew, but from my results it was clear I was missing something.