Introducing Halle Berry - Softcover

Chapter One: Shades of Meaning

A dog is flying across the room. It's Oscar time. The night of nights. The starriest evening of the year, even in a town like Hollywood -- known for constellations. Tom Hanks is here. Mel Gibson. Denzel Washington. Will Smith. Julia Roberts. But there is only one woman in the spotlight right now: Halle Berry. Tears are running down her cheeks. Her neck is tight with emotion. In her left hand she clutches the Academy Award for best actress. It is the first ever given to a woman of color. She holds it tight as if someone might take it away from her, even now, even in front of the hundreds of stars in the audience, the thousands of ordinary spectators, the millions of television viewers. But there is a dog flying across the room. She is thinking about her family. All the struggle, all the pain, all the setbacks -- it's all coming back, as if it never left. She pays tribute to her mother, her husband, her stepchild. She also pays homage to her father -- but not the one who was her biological parent. Berry calls her manager, Vincent Cirrincione, the man who helped guide her career for twelve years, "the only father I've ever known." Halle is a true child of showbiz now. The past is past. But that dog, its tongue bleeding red, continues its flight across the room.

The beginning wasn't pretty. It's hard to look at Halle Berry now -- the bright hopeful eyes, the perfectly tousled hair, the smile as white as clouds on a sunny day -- and imagine that her story started with so much ugliness. Even now she has grotesque memories: of screams and slaps, of fights at the dining room table, of battles between her mother and father. When I first talked to Halle in 1991, I expected her to talk only of pretty things: her red-hot career, her looks, fashion, other beautiful movie folks. Instead, she had ugliness on her mind: the pressures of working in Hollywood, the difficulty of being a woman in the film industry, the barriers faced by actors of color, and the racism she had faced her entire life because she was a black woman. "I got called 'Zebra' and 'Oreo' in school," she told me.

Halle was born into struggle. It's the mid-1960s. J.F.K. has already been assassinated; M.L.K. is about to be. It is illegal in sixteen states for blacks and whites to marry each other. In places around the South, blacks and whites use separate rest rooms; in places around the North, blacks and whites attend separate public schools (that part is still true). But at the movies -- a projection of hope perhaps or an outlet for social fantasy -- there are some encouraging trends. At the Academy Awards for 1963, Sidney Poitier wins the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in Lilies of the Field as a journeyman who meets up with a group of nuns. He is the first African American ever to win the award. It would be four more decades before an African-American woman would follow suit.

Around the same time, in the mid-1960s, against the odds, against prevailing social trends, against the wishes of their parents, a white woman and a black man fall in love in Cleveland, Ohio. Her name is Judith Hawkins and she is a nurse in a psychiatric hospital; his name is Jerome Berry, and he is a nurse's aide in that same hospital. Judith was a native of Liverpool, England, but left when she was ten and grew up in the suburb of Elyria, Ohio. The two begin to date and are soon married; in 1966 they have their first child together, a daughter they name Heide. Then, on August 14, 1966, the couple has their second and final child together: a daughter they name Halle. It is an unusual name for a baby who will go on to have an extraordinary career. "My mother was shopping in Halle Brothers in Cleveland," Berry was quoted as saying by the Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service in 2000. "She saw their bags and thought, 'That's what I'm going to name my child.' No one ever says it right. It's Halle, like Sally." She was given the middle name of Maria.

Cleveland, with all due respect, is not the kind of place one expects legends to be born. It is, however, part of a region that has given birth to its share of American presidents: William Henry Harrison, Benjamin Harrison, William Howard Taft, and William Harding all hail from the state. The Buckeye State has also given rise to a number of other luminaries, including Olympic athlete Jesse Owens, singer Tracy Chapman, and talk-show host Phil Donahue. More on point, a number of notable actors come from Cleveland, including Ruby Dee, Hal Holbrook, and Debra Winger. "I come from humble, humble beginnings," Halle told the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1997. "One mother and two latchkey kids. We went without a whole lot of things; we had the bare essentials, but for the most part we struggled....So I can understand having big dreams and little money, and no way of knowing how you're gonna make 'em come true. Most definitely."

Halle said to London's Daily Mail in 1993: "I think being raised by a single parent was important for me because I saw the struggle. I don't believe all that Hollywood hype that goes with this business. I know I'm only as good and as bad as the last film I just did and people don't care about me. If someone chooses to put me in a movie it's because they think I can make them money. It's not because of Halle Berry."

Cleveland has been in economic decline since perhaps the 1970s. Around 20 percent of all Ohio residents are employed in manufacturing. But sometime around the date of Halle's birth, the economic character of the state began to change. The factories in the area had become old and inefficient, having failed to modernize and keep up with the times. Every few years, someone in Ohio or in Washington, D.C., announces that there's a new boom under way in the Rust Belt states or that some economic miracle is just around the corner, but the truth is the region is still, at the time of this writing, immersed in a slump.

Cleveland should be beautiful. The name "Ohio" is a French adaptation of a Seneca-Iroquois word meaning "beautiful river." Cleveland should rock -- it claims to be the birthplace of rock 'n' roll and is home to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. Cleveland should be a haven for African Americans. It was a hub for runaway slaves seeking freedom on the Underground Railroad during slavery, and several Union generals, including Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, hail from Ohio. The state was also once home to Harriet Beecher Stowe, the woman who wrote the abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. But Cleveland is also, infamously, the place where a river caught fire. In 1972, the Cuyahoga River, which had become choked with industrial pollution, burst into flames. As for music, Cleveland hasn't launched a significant new rock act in years.

In terms of race relations, young Halle found that her city and state had a long way to go. She also found, early on, that she had to deal with racial issues without being able to rely on her father for help or advice. Jerome Berry left his young family when Halle was four years old. According to Halle, her father was abusive -- to her, to her sister, to her mother, and even to himself. "He was an alcoholic, he battered my mother," Halle said to People in 1996. "I haven't had much to do with him." Halle was also left with familial guilt -- could she have done more to stop his rampages? Obviously, because she was only a small child, she couldn't have done anything, but guilt, and memory, work in strange ways. "He beat my mom and my sister," Halle told the New York Times in 2002. "He threw our dog against the wall. He never hit me. I felt a lot of guilt. When my sister saw him hitting my mother, she would jump in and get hit, but I would run and hide. I got out of the way."

Strangely, Halle seems to have transferred some culpability for her father's abuse onto her sister -- Halle and Heidi are reportedly estranged, and do not talk regularly or have a close relationship. Halle told Movieline in December 2001/January 2002: "We fought a lot. I don't know but part of me feels we never recovered from the adolescent years. We fought for real. Sometimes drawing blood. I moved away from home at such a young age that the relationship never quite repaired itself."

The first time I talked to Halle in 1991, I was struck by how immediate, how palpable, the pain and turmoil of her childhood still seems to her. It was one of the first subjects she brought up, and it was raised with little prompting from me. Perhaps being upfront about her background is her way of dealing with it. One of her high school classmates told me that not long after she met Halle for the first time, Halle broke out pictures of her parents and explained that they were of different races. Images from her family turmoil still haunt her, particularly the dog-tossing incident. In the Mirror in 2002, Halle was quoted as saying "We had a toy Maltese and my father threw it across the dining room at dinner and the dog almost bit its tongue off." That's a scene that's hard to forget. Halle went on: "The blood and that image. When somebody mentions my father, that's the first thing I think about -- that dog flying across the room. I remember crying: 'God, let him leave!' so that my life could get back to normal."

But when one is raised in such circumstances, what is normal? Sometimes dysfunction, eventually, inevitably, becomes the accepted, even longed-for, state of affairs. After their first breakup, Halle's parents got back together for one year in 1976. It was an optimistic year: the national nightmare of Watergate was receding; Jimmy Carter, with his big peanut-farmer smile, had taken the White House; and the whole U.S.A. was gearing up to celebrate the bicentennial. At the movies, Rocky had grabbed the Academy Award for best picture and George Lucas was putting the finishing touches on his escapist sci-fi classic Star Wars.

Perhaps caught up in the general spirit of optimism, Judith Berry took Jerome Berry back. The experiment failed and the family split up again within a year. Halle, who, in his absence, had idealized her father to a certain extent, in part because she didn't really know him, was forced to deal with the reality of who he was. It was a crushing time. "I had longed for my father a lot until that time," Halle told InStyle in July 2000. "But he was not the image I had made my daddy out to be. If I had lived with him any longer that year, I know I would have turned out to be a very different kind of person."

Halle confided to London's Daily Mail in 1993 that she thought her father's drinking was a root cause of her family's turmoil. "My mother couldn't deal with it and he left. He came back a few years later but he wasn't any better. He was like a stranger to us and then he just disappeared. I see his mother, my grandmother, and he contacts her once in a while. She tells me he's still an alcoholic, and he's been into every drug going. I'd like to help him but I don't think he would appreciate me doing that, plus I haven't the slightest idea how to get in contact with him."

Later, when Halle was twenty-two years old and a young adult, she met up with her father again. This time, she said, she "felt nothing." But the nothingness was a cover for a complex tangle of feelings. In an interview with the Washington Post in 1999 she explained her feelings more fully: "I realized that I always had a feeling of not being enough and that came from my father leaving. It came from so many things that I never felt good enough. I really suffered from low self-esteem for many years."

Later in life Halle came to realize that her relationship, or lack of one, with her father had poisoned her relationship with men. It made her reach out, time and time again, for men who were wrong for her, who disrespected her, who were abusive in varying ways. Halle told the Express in 2002: "I equated that kind of behavior with love."

Jerome Berry is said to have fallen mortally ill. He is reportedly suffering from Parkinson's disease. One member of the Berry clan told me that making up with Halle "is his main goal. I think that's what he's living for -- the day she walks in his room. He wants to apologize to her. Because he doesn't understand the anger that's in her that's against him."

Reconciliation, however, doesn't seem to be in the immediate future. "I've forgiven him, but I haven't forgotten," Berry told the Mirror in 2002. "I have no love for him, because to me he is a complete stranger. I don't want him to be part of my life. I don't know him and I don't owe him anything."

One of the worst things any estranged parent can do is to reach out to a child after that son or daughter has made it big. Success doesn't diminish loss, it magnifies it; when one is forced to succeed without a parent, every dollar one earns, every accolade one receives, arrives with this underlying feeling: I did this without my father or mother. Damn him. Damn her. The damnation is cumulative and damaging. Fame and fortune, instead of being things one revels in, become things that force one to revisit one's root loss -- and to curse it all over again. When Halle and her father crossed paths after she had become a star, rage seemed to always be close behind -- even when their involvement was only from afar. "I have no contact with my father," Halle told the New York Times in 2001. "A few years ago he sold a story to The Star about me for a six-pack of beer. I thought, If you're going to sell the damn story, then at least make some real money."

Judith moved her family out to the predominately white Cleveland suburb of Oakwood Village when Halle was ten years old. But there were tensions there as well. As Halle mingled with other children in school, she soon discovered that the things she took for granted -- like having parents of two different races -- were, to some, controversial. And early on, her fellow students introduced her to racial intolerance. Halle told Barbara Walters in 2002: "Yeah, I think probably when I was in the third grade and it was from another kid at school who had gotten a glimpse of my mother and told me that she couldn't possibly be my mother because had I noticed that she was white and I wasn't."

Rage and questions of race were often intermingled. Even with Halle's father out of the picture, there were other things that sparked emotional outbursts -- and they often had to do with racial confrontations. "I remember the fury my mother would feel in line at the grocery store because people around us assumed that these black kids couldn't possibly be her children," Halle told the Daily Telegraph (London) in 2002.

In July 2002 I talked to one of Halle's Bedford High School classmates, Stacy Lavinsky. Halle and Lavinsky met in tenth grade in a Spanish class. Their mothers knew each other a bit and that helped the kids to develop a friendship. Lavinsky was always curious about the life of models and, at the time, Halle was also giving the profession a lot of thought, and so the two frequently talked about the subject. Lavinsky, who is white, says it was difficult to strike...