right!”
Coach must have liked my enthusiasm because he picked up the phone that instant and called his agent in Key Biscayne, Florida. He said he had a new young actor who they needed to sign up.
The agency was called Marbea Talent, and a lovely lady by the name of Maria Beatty ran it. Coach and I went down to visit the agency a week later, and the agent signed me within five minutes. This was the best news I had ever had; I was now an actor and I was going to be in films and TV commercials! I just knew my family was going to be proud of me. I got headshots and prepared a resume, and within a week of submitting it all to my agent, I was sent out on a TV commercial.
I didn’t land that first commercial, but it didn’t matter because I was picked for a small role in a big film that was called “The Greatest” starring Muhammad Ali as himself. It was partly shot in Miami and I played a “Young Man” that hits on Muhammad Ali’s girlfriend at a party. Although my role was eventually cut out of the film, it did get me a membership card to the Screen Actors Guild. It also made me very popular among my cousins, aunts, grandparents, and other family members from New Jersey to Florida.
I absolutely loved acting; it was what I wanted to do with my life. My new showbiz experience proved to be a great talking point with my friend JC—we would hang out at his house and just sit outside on his porch and talk about making it in the music and film industries. JC would talk about becoming a famous singer and I would talk about going to Hollywood to be a movie star. Sometimes JC and I would entertain his sisters in the house by singing a few songs. JC sang mostly Elvis Presley and I would sing songs by the Stylistics and Earth, Wind & Fire. His sisters loved it.
Everywhere JC and I went we talked music and Hollywood; this was the glue that bonded us together. I picked up some roles in TV shows and commercials. In Atlanta, I picked up role in TV movies like The Lady and The Lynchings for PBS, a movie-of-the-week called King, The Vengeance of Tony Cimo for an NBC movie-of-the-week, and even a Coca Cola commercial. This was all great, but what I really wanted to do was Hollywood movies. For every film audition my Miami agency sent me to, Coach was going to three or four—there were a lot more roles for white actors than there were for black actors.
But I didn’t lose heart. I took acting classes at a local theater and read every acting book I could get my hands on. Coach and I had become very good friends by this point, and I would often visit his house in Coral Springs. I got to know his wife and his kids and thought they were great people. I couldn’t keep my mind off Hollywood, though. I was already making plans in my mind to head west and try my luck. I had stars in my eyes and there was no way I could shake them. I had a long talk with my mother and told her my plans, and she said that if it was what I really wanted to do, then she was one hundred percent behind me. My mom, I found out, had become my biggest fan.
I did some research and found out that an old friend of my brother Willie Jr. was living out in Los Angeles, so I connected with him and laid out plans for my trip. About a month later my mother took me to the airport where I bought a one-way plane ticket with only seventeen dollars in my pocket. I kissed my mom goodbye and boarded the plane for Hollywood.
California Dreaming
In Los Angeles I stayed with my brother’s friend Levi at a boarding house near downtown. I slept on the sofa in Levi’s room. There was one single bathroom upstairs that all the tenants shared. The owner of the place was an old black woman named Momma Betty, or Momma as we called her, and she always talked about how she used to work for the LAPD as a policewoman. We never knew if the story was true, but we often went downstairs to her apartment and listened to her stories.
Levi was also into acting, and so the both of us searched for a good acting school we could afford. We found a place over on Pico and Vermont called the “Inner City Cultural Center” that was a performing arts school that taught dance, singing, and drama. Not only did the place have a few successful TV and film actors teaching classes like Debbie Allen and Glynn Turman, but it was also a great place to hang out. We spent a lot of time there even when we weren’t acting; it sort of became a home away from home.
I picked up a nonpaying job over at Trade Tec College and taught karate a couple of times a week to women on campus who had been harassed. In my class I met a nice-looking black woman with a big afro named Betty Wilcox. She studied business, and after a few classes we began to talk a bit more and then we had lunch together. Within a week, we were going steady. At first, I wasn’t really romantically interested in Betty, but I was lonely and in need of female companionship. Betty and I went out for about four months and decided to get married; it was a crazy idea because I was only 18 and didn’t know crap about life.
We got married downtown at one of those little quick wedding chapels, and a week later we got an apartment in Los Angeles. My friend JC flew out to see me for a couple of days, and he could not believe that I had gotten married so fast, particularly to someone who seemed to him to be the wrong woman. All the time JC was visiting, Betty and I were at each other’s throats about one thing or another. JC flew back to Florida, and within two weeks Betty and I moved to another apartment out in Long Beach. We were just not getting along. Betty had a bad alcohol problem—one of her co-workers at the Carson City Hall would call me at home and tell me that Betty came to work drunk five days a week. I also suspected that she was cheating on me, and this would be confirmed later. I got Betty into AA for alcohol treatment, but she quit almost immediately and kept up her normal routine. I had had enough, and after being married for just under a year, I filed for divorce. It was time to get out.
While all this was happening, I read the newspaper one morning and I saw an article that stated that the wedding chapel where we got married was an illegal operation and gave out bogus marriage licenses. I couldn’t believe it. We were never officially married! But just to be sure, I filed a “Summary Dissolution” for couples who had been married under one year and wanted to separate.
Betty moved out and I got myself another apartment, and soon I found a film agent on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Earnestine McClendon was one of the only few black agents in the business at that time. She sent me on a few auditions for TV commercials and one for a film, but that was about it. The work was coming so slow that I had to find some temp work, and after a few odd jobs, I picked up a full-time job as a graveyard-shift security guard at a mall.
While I waited for my acting career to take off, I met a new tenant at my apartment complex by the name of Reverend Jones. He reminded me of Bill Cosby, but with a white beard. Reverend Jones and I would talk at the complex about the Bible, and as we got to know each other better I would stay over at his place late just to have a one-on-one Bible study. We did that for about a year and it really opened up my mind about who God was and what God expected of me as a person. Reverend Jones suggested that we both save a little money by moving in together, and so I moved in and we studied the Bible seven days a week. Soon, we started a church in his little apartment called Mount Sinai. We got some of the tenants at the apartment to attend, and it was a great feeling. Reverend Jones also helped out some troubled youths in the neighborhood; they would stop by and he would feed them and preach the Bible.
One of the youths Reverend helped was a 14-year-old kid named David who was half Mexican and half white. He looked like a young John Belushi. David lived with his alcoholic mother, but he often ended up sleeping at our place. David could be wild at times, like the time I had to stop him from sniffing car gasoline to get high. But he was a good guy who was generous with the few things he had.
About this time I met another girl at the apartment complex named Pam who had just gone through some personal relationship problems. She invited me to go her church over in Gardena and I jumped at the chance. That Sunday we drove out to Gardena in her car to a little church called Christian Apogee Church. The place was in a little corner building that the church was renting out, and the pastor was a lady by the name of Audra. I had heard that Audra was a member of the mega church called Crenshaw Christian Center in Inglewood, but it was rumored that she left to form her own church after some inner-church problems. I thought the service was very good and felt at home because my mom had always taken us to small churches like that where there were about twenty-five people in attendance.
During the service