You Have No Idea: A Famous Daughter, Her No-Nonsense Mother, and How They Survived Pageants, Hollywood, Love, Loss (20 page)

I was almost in Spike Lee’s
SCHOOL DAZE
,
but Melanie’s in my tummy.

In Malibu with Richard Pryor for
ANOTHER YOU

Studio time with Chaka Khan and the gang

(clockwise) Lynn Whitfield, Vanessa Bell Calloway, Jasmine Guy, and me in
STOMPIN’ AT THE SAVOY

Singing “La Vie en Rose” as Josephine Baker for
MOTOWN RETURNS TO THE APOLLO

CHAPTER

15

You can’t have your husband also be your manager because something will suffer—either your marriage or your career. You need to have a bit of a break from each other.

—HELEN WILLIAMS

A
ll my children were conceived on vacations, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when I returned from a trip to the Exumas in the Bahamas and discovered I was pregnant.

Ramon and I were thrilled. I loved creating a family. I’d grown up with parents who believed that marriage and children were the most important things. I know a lot of people feel that a family can get in the way of a career, especially when you’re starting out. But I felt the opposite—creating a family gave me something else to focus on. I wasn’t consumed with my career. I couldn’t become self-absorbed because I was too busy changing diapers.

We were living in a house in Playa del Rey, a seaside town southwest of Los Angeles, when I went into labor. I hate hospitals. Who doesn’t? So I waited until the very last minute to leave the comfort of my home for the sterile, scary environment of a hospital. Guess I
waited too long! I thought I was going to give birth right in the Saab. It was a close call. I was squeezing the handle above the window through intense contractions. I was in agony and the contractions were right on top of one another. Ramon raced through the streets and dropped me off at the emergency entrance of Cedars-Sinai.

I checked into triage. Then Dr. Reichman arrived wearing a white linen suit. She told me I was ten centimeters dilated and instructed someone to tell Ramon to hurry parking the car or he was going to miss his baby’s birth.

I never made it to the delivery room. I had my baby right in the labor room. Ramon ran in just minutes before I gave birth to Jillian Kristen. She was born at 10:35 in the morning on June 19, 1989.

I had just moved into my hospital room and was being served lunch while Jillian slept in my arms. Ramon, who had called everyone with the news and then left to take care of some business, walked back into the room, carrying a big boom box.

“I need you to do some liners for Japan,” he said.

I thought,
WHAT? Now?
You’re kidding me, right?

“The deadline is today.”

I just pushed out OUR child a few hours ago!

I was pissed with Ramon for thinking about business at a time like this. Right then it was clear to me that the line had been blurred between wife and client. I did the work. I’m a pro. But I was so resentful because I just wanted my husband, not my manager, there.

Instead of telling him any of this, I kept it to myself and just did it.

I was building a lot of pent-up frustration toward Ramon because he didn’t know how to take off the manager hat and just be a husband, a father. It wasn’t completely his fault—I had asked him to manage me. It was
our
fault. Ramon and I didn’t have any escape from each other. We were always together and it seemed that, no matter what, it was always about the work. But I also knew he was the only one who saw my potential.

He knew a lot about the biz. And I relied on his knowledge, although control issues had become blurred because of our dual roles as husband/manager and wife/talent.

I
was supposed to be in control of
my
career, yet I was in my twenties and raising a family. I couldn’t possibly do it all. I’d let Ramon be in charge of my career and our money because it was too much to handle. But I didn’t feel like I had any control whatsoever.

Jillian was only eight weeks old when Ramon and I headed to Glasgow to promote
The Right Stuff
in Great Britain. It was my first time away from my newborn and two-year-old Melanie. We hired a grandmother-type nanny. Ramon felt pressure from the European label to expose me to the worldwide market, but I desperately wanted to stay home. Two weeks is a long time to be away from a newborn. I was nursing, swollen, bleeding. Plus, I would miss milestones in her brand-new life. I had Ramon’s family in L.A. to check up on them, but I wanted my babies.

When I went through airport security in Scotland, the screeners pulled my breast pump out of my carry-on bag, looked at it strangely, and asked me what it was. I thought,
Why the hell am I doing this? I’m traveling with a breast pump but no baby!
How do you balance career and motherhood? I had to go; our livelihood depended on it, so there wasn’t a choice. My career won that battle.

Now it’s hip and sexy to be a mom or have a baby bump, but back then you had to hide it, or at least, not flaunt it. I felt I had to prove I could still do the work despite being a new mom.

As a singer, I was supposed to be sexy and alluring, not an exhausted mother and wife who wanted to stay home and breast-feed.

But I
was
exhausted by the demands of motherhood. In between radio interviews, I pumped my breasts, threw out the milk, and bottled my growing resentments.

When I returned home I began work on my second album,
The Comfort Zone
. Since I’d already had some hits with
The Right Stuff
, it was much easier to find music—publishers submitted songs to Ed for me. But even though the last album went gold, in some ways I felt like I was starting from scratch. I told Ed I didn’t want to sing any of those “I can’t live without you” or “without you I’m nothing” type songs. They never spoke to me. I never liked lyrics that involved a woman begging and pleading for a man. It wasn’t in my constitution. I’m not that girl and never have been.

I didn’t want to sing ballads about wimpy girls waiting to find love. I wanted to combine killer dance tunes with rich ballads as well as some familiar tunes. I decided on “What Will I Tell My Heart?” and a remake of the Isley Brothers’ “Work to Do.”

I still had so much to prove. I had to fill this album with great, great songs.

Legend has it that Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler passed on it, but who knows if that’s true. Because when “Save the Best for Last” became a huge hit, everyone was like, “Why didn’t I get that song?” No one would ever admit that they didn’t hear its potential. But the song had never been intended for me. The writers had shopped it around to a bunch of artists who all said no—until it finally found its way to me.

I’d already had a hit with the ballad “Dreamin’,” so when Ed was sent “Save the Best for Last,” he knew I could nail it. The song was cowritten by Wendy Waldman (she’d written songs for Crystal Gayle, Aaron Neville, Judy Collins, and Bette Midler, to name a few), who performed the ballad on the demo tape. I listened to this sweet, pure voice accompanied by a piano and simple production and immediately got chills. I knew it was a great song that was unique and not overproduced. The melody line was haunting and powerful and beautiful. To me, that’s what makes a song wonderful: It lives with you and you can’t get it out of your head—once you
absorb it, you can’t forget it. The simplicity of a fantastic melody is undeniable. I was hooked.

But I had no idea how big it would be.

Ed had paired me up with Keith Thomas, a writer and producer who was known mostly as a Christian and gospel music producer. Keith had just branched into R & B and had written and recorded “Heaven,” a big hit for R & B singers BeBe and CeCe Winans. I loved the song. It was not your usual idea for a gospel song. It was warm, rich, and contemporary but at the same time, very soulful. The first time I heard it, I was blown away. So when Ed set up a meeting, I was very excited to meet Keith.

When Keith walked into Ed’s office, Ed and I were both shocked. He was white! Because of the music he’d done, we had just expected him to be black. Ed and I looked at each other and smiled—in front of us was this five-foot-eight white guy with brown curly hair and a thick Southern accent. He was full of life, really excited, and eager for an opportunity to cross over into a more mainstream territory.

Since he’d worked with Quincy Jones for years, Ed had a bunch of what I referred to as Quincyisms. He’d tell me, “Once you cross over you can never get black.” Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, and anyone who was embraced by the pop world after being “made” by the black community had “crossed over.” It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. That’s where the money is. But at the same time, you don’t want to lose your core audience. You want to straddle the color lines and survive. That’s the mission. I knew that the R & B audience and urban listeners who had made
The Right Stuff
a hit were black. The task with a sophomore record was to reach a wider audience.

Time for album number two. The girls, our new nanny—Kathi—and I moved into a hotel in Franklin, Tennessee, a tiny town about twenty miles south of downtown Nashville, where Keith had his studio, Yellow Elephant Music, Inc. He had signed on to produce
50 percent of the album—five songs, including “Save the Best for Last.”

Franklin (now famous for being Miley Cyrus’s hometown) was such a small town that the only place to stay by the studio was a hotel right off the highway. There was a main street with a town square, a quilting store, and a movie theater. I’d record all day and my girls would stop by and visit. It was such a simple and relaxing time. Keith was eager to make hits with me, excited that we could prove ourselves together.

You feel extremely vulnerable when you record a song because you’re in a room alone while everyone else is on the other side of the big plate-glass window, listening to every sound that comes out of your mouth. Your voice seems so loud and every sound you make seems amplified. You’re singing while taking direction and listening to criticism. Then you take a break and do it all over again, for days and days.