On Thursday, two days after publishing her memoir Just As I Am, Hollywood legend Cicely Tyson passed away at the age of 96.
A civil rights activist, Tyson spent her life telling riveting stories on stage and onscreen. But the last story Tyson chose to tell before her death was her won. Filled with historical moments and heartwarming anecdotes, it was her final gift to the world.
Tyson’s groundbreaking characters in Sounder (1969) and Roots (1977) immortalized Black humanity onscreen and inspired icons like Denzel Washington and Viola Davis.
Davis, who played Tyson’s daughter in How to Get Away with Murder, wrote in the foreword of the memoir, “Every one of these characters has left me with an emotional, spiritual, and psychological inheritance I will forever carry with me.”
In Just As I Am, she details some of her proudest moments, some she’s not so proud of, and some that are just good to laugh at. “The lesson, I know now, is to relish the ride,” she offers readers. Here are five stories straight from her memoir of the great Cicely Tyson.
1. Tyson sued Elizabeth Taylor
After Taylor’s production company fired Tyson from the 1983 Broadway revival of The Corn Is Green, she hit back for the earnings she was owed, severing Hollywood connections in the process.
Tyson recalls years later when she walked up to James Earl Jones in a Beverly Hills restaurant without realizing who his dinner partner was: Liz Taylor herself. “We exchanged one of those fake double-cheek kisses, and she laughed as she said to James, ‘You know something? Cicely sued me,’” Tyson writes.
“She then turned to me and smirked, ‘And how much money did you get?’ I raised my shoulders, thrust my nose heavenward, and announced loudly enough for the room to hear, ‘I was awarded more than a half-million dollars.’”
2. Tyler Perry always paid her extra
Cicely Tyson was what we would describe today as a woman in her bag. Tyler Perry is well-known for being generous, but when it comes to Tyson, it’s a much different story.
The two icons of Black Hollywood have been friendly since her role in 2005’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman, and in the years since, they’ve built a friendship spanning six films. “When he heard how little I was paid for Sounder and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, his mouth fell open,” she writes.
“From then on, he decided to double, and sometimes even triple or quadruple, my asking price for any role he requested that I play.”
He also enriched her life in other ways. Tyson is godmother to Perry’s son, Aman. “You should see that child and me down on the carpet together, doing handstands, with a nervous Tyler standing by to be sure I don’t crack my neck,” she writes. “What a joy.”
3. She was Lenny Kravitz’s godmother
Once while she was living on 74th Street in Manhattan, Tyson opened up her terrace and saw a group of musicians playing in Riverside Park. Down for a party, she headed over and found Lisa Bonet, the then-wife of rock star Lenny Kravitz, who happens to be her “beloved godson,” the son of her old friend actress Roxie Roker and filmmaker Sy Kravitz.
“What are you all doing over here in my neighbourhood?” Tyson asked Bonet. “We’re cutting Lenny’s record.” When she made it back to her apartment, she just had to call his mom. “‘You hear all that noise?’ I said, raising the phone’s receiver out on the terrace. ‘That’s your son and daughter-in-law making all of this noise in our neighbourhood.’” she recalled. “We both just fell out laughing.”
4. Tyson snatched her husband’s weave after he cheated on her
In the memoir, she revisits her marriage-ending fight with Miles Davis that made headlines. One afternoon in 1987, six years into their marriage and long after Tyson first sniffed out “the stench of Miles’s philandering”; she found and hid a note from another woman containing the address for his rendezvous.
“I’m not giving you anything,” she sneered. “Why don’t you go out and meet your woman? You know where to meet her”. As she tried to leave, Davis twisted her wrist, so she grabbed his beloved hair weave. “Well, honey, he got to twisting and turning. And the more he tugged his head back and forth, trying to pry himself loose, the tighter I held on,” she writes.
“By the time he struggled free, I was holding a whole bushel of his weave in my right hand. I hurled it onto the ground, marched out the door, and slammed it shut.” She would divorce him a year later, though she remained in his life until his death in 1991.
“At one point, I heard Miles saying to someone on the phone, ‘Do you know how much I paid for that weave? And she just snatched it right off of my head!’” she remembers. “I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cringe, which is why I did both.”
5. She hung up on Barack Obama
Tyson has received quite a number of honours in her lifetime: the Spingarn Medal, the most distinguished honour the NAACP bestows; a Kennedy Center honour; an honorary Academy Award; and the honour of hanging up on President Barack Obama.
When Obama’s aide called Tyson to let her know she was being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, the actress refused to believe it. “‘Oh please,’ I said laughing, feeling sure it was a prankster talking some foolishness,” Tyson writes in her memoir. “‘How did you even get this number?’ She tried to persuade me that her declaration was true, but I wouldn’t hear of it.”
Tyson hung up with a click. Once she realized her mistake, her manager got the White House on the phone to confirm her attendance at the ceremony, where she received the final Medal of Honor of Barack Obama’s presidency.
Source: Vulture
