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Introducing Halle Berry, by Christopher John Farley
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Christopher John Farley first interviewed Halle Berry in 1991, at the beginning of her career. Now the Time Magazine Senior Editor provides the first in-depth look at Berry, the actress, the woman, and the history-maker. Abandoned by her father at a young age, a childhood in Cleveland, Ohio marred by racism and an abusive relationship. The odds against Halle Berry were extraordinary. But no one could have dreamed how far her determination would take her. From a breakthrough role in Spike Lee's JUNGLE FEVER to her Emmy Award-winning performance in HBO's INTRODUCING DOROTHY DANDRIDGE, Berry exhibited a tenacity that would eventually lead to MONSTER'S BALL and her best Actress Oscar, the first African American actress to receive the honour. Christopher John Farley provides a biography that is something more: with the sure sense of cultural analysis he displays in his weekly columns and reviews in Time magazine, INTRODUCING HALLE BERRY is an absorbing and inspiring biography.
- Sales Rank: #5022855 in Books
- Published on: 2002-10-29
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 4.22" h x .75" w x 6.84" l,
- Binding: Mass Market Paperback
- 256 pages
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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 up an interracial friendship at Bedford High at the time. Racial boundaries at the school were lines that were not to be crossed. Says Lavinksy: "It was extremely hard to get along. There was a lot of racism going on between the blacks and the whites. This is from my perspective."
It was during this period that Halle developed a personal trait that would serve to both undermine some of her future relationships and also help to propel her to the top of her chosen profession. At her new school, in her new town, she felt isolated and anomalous. Even as she endured the stares and half-heard some of the taunts, a desire began to grow in her: She wanted to find ways to demonstrate her talent, and her worth, to everyone around her. This yearning for acceptance and acknowledgment would drive her all her life. It was, like other primal wants -- for air, for food -- something that could be temporarily satisfied but never completely sated. It was an enormous, insatiable need. "I was one of only three or four black high school kids, and I felt the need to prove I was as smart as everyone else," Halle told the publication Scotland on Sunday in 2000. "After high school, I was worn out with proving and working. It felt like I had a day job in high school. Trying to be Miss Everything." Halle disclosed to the New York Times in 1995: "It was sickening how much I craved being liked. I was Miss Everything -- cheerleader, student senator, on the newspaper, the honor roll, you name it."
With only one overworked parent around to care for her, Halle was left largely untutored in a number of important personal development areas. Love was one of them. Halle told the British edition of Glamour in July 2002 that when she was seven or eight she began asking her mother all the inevitable questions about where babies come from. Her mother sat her down and, along with Halle, paged through some books about the subject. Young Halle, confronted with the facts, thought: "That's gotta really hurt. Why would anybody want to do that?" Her mother didn't answer -- probably because she knew that, in time, Halle would find out for herself. Another area in which Halle's education was lacking was in the topic of race. Jerome Berry, despite his failings, might have been able to tell her about her background. Had he stayed in the picture, he might have been able to explain to her the burdens and hardships of being African American, the challenges, the history, the racist barriers. But he wasn't there, and the only parent Halle had left, Judith Berry, couldn't tell her that much about being African American or even American, given the fact that she was born neither. "My father left Mom with two little black kids," Halle was quoted as saying in 2000. "She supported us working as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital and I saw her go through a lot of pain." Halle so admired her mom that when Halle was ten she wanted to be a psychiatrist because, at the time, her mother was a nurse on the psych ward of a veteran's hospital.
In the movies, race mixing is often depicted as difficult, tragic, even life-threatening. In Imitation of Life (1934; remade in 1959), a light-skinned woman who passes for white is portrayed as confused and sad. In the musical West Side Story (1961), a love affair between a white man and a Puerto Rican woman (played by the not-at-all Puerto Rican Natalie Wood) ends in death and bloodshed. Fictional movies about racial mixing sometimes generate strong real-world response: When the film Island in the Sun (1957), which co-stars Dorothy Dandridge and depicts (rather benignly) interracial affairs, was first released, the South Carolina legislature considered fining any theater that screened it $5,000; Darryl Zanuck, the producer, announced he'd pay any and all penalties himself; the South Carolina legislature eventually backed down.
Halle cut through all the negative messages about race-mixing in the media all around her and drew her own conclusions about who she was. "Being the product of an interracial marriage, I've always known the racial divide is insane and ridiculous," she told the Los Angeles Times in 2002. And Halle's mother pointed her daughter in the right direction. "I am white and you are black," Halle's mother told her. Judith didn't want Halle living an in-between life, an existence in the margins, belonging to two races and being wanted or claimed by neither. Halle was quoted as saying in 2000: "[My mother] taught me to identify myself as black because that's what people see. Mom said, 'Be glad you're different.' She told me I was God's special child. I could have looked like dirt on a shoe and she would have put me on a pedestal."
Halle told me in 1991 that one reason she thought of herself as black is that she didn't want to end up like the mixed-race folks she saw in the popular media. She didn't want an "imitation of life," she wanted the real thing, the whole thing, and she wanted to break free of all the images and stereotypes that were associated with kids with parents of different races. She said to me, "I see people on talk shows who are mixed and they seem very confused." She didn't feel confused, not about race. She looked black and she felt black. Her racial identity would be one constant in her life.
America is, of course, a racially mixed country. And in recent years, as the number of interracial marriages has climbed, there are more Americans who can claim mixed race ancestry. The fact is, though, that things are even more blended than they seem. While only people who look partially "black" are considered to be of mixed race, the truth is, many so-called white Americans actually have black ancestry and just don't know it or haven't thought to check. According to molecular anthropologist Mark D. Shriver, more than fifty million "white" Americans have at least one black ancestor. In other words, about 30 percent of whites in America are actually partially black but just don't know it.
In addition, at the turn of the millennium, public acceptance of interracial marriages is at record levels. A 1997 Gallup poll found that 77 percent of blacks and 61 percent of whites approve of such unions. Multiracial stars are all over the media, from golfer Tiger Woods to actor Vin Diesel to NBA star Jason Kidd to singers Mariah Carey, Christina Aguilera, and Alicia Keys. Taking her mother's advice, Halle took a stand in her own life that differed from multiracial stars such as Tiger Woods, who has described himself as "Cablinasian" and who doesn't view himself as black, white, or Asian. Halle told Ebony in 1992: "I think the problems are made worse when people get on talk shows and make statements like 'I had a hard time because I was caught in the middle.' It doesn't have to be that way. I think being biracial is one of the best things in the world." Since she was a little girl, Halle has thought of herself as one thing: black.
People have a right to define themselves, and it's difficult for anyone to say what the right choice in such matters should be, but Halle's decision certainly can be described as a brave one, and it was a signal of things to come. Her choice showed that she was a woman who was prepared to take a difficult path, even if easier roads were stretched before her; her choice sent a message that she was prepared to embrace outsider culture, even if she was offered an inside track. "Sure, I can say that I'm biracial, and technically I am," Halle told Ebony. "But as my mother said to me: 'What do you see when you look in the mirror? You see what everyone else sees. They don't know you're biracial. They don't know who your mother is, and they aren't going to care.'"
Interestingly, Halle didn't view her racial identity as a choice; she saw it as something she had to accept, like her height or the color of her eyes. Halle told Movieline in 2002: "It's not a choice you make. For me to sit here and say, 'I feel white,' somebody would try and commit me somewhere. When people see me, nobody ever thinks I'm white. No person in my whole life has ever thought that I was white. As I've gotten older people have thought I was Mexican or Chicano or Italian even. But never white, and not connected to anything...Kids are cruel....They're spewing out the views of their parents; they often don't even know what they're saying."
Halle also told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2002: "The great thing about my mother is that even though she was white, she was really concerned about what would happen to me as I grew up as a black woman in this country. She taught me a lot about my history, where I came from and how to maybe deal with racism. Don't get mad about it, don't get militant about it, but make quiet change, you know. Live a good life and work hard at whatever I decide to do. And that's the best revenge, to succeed in this country where maybe people don't want to see us as a race succeed."
W.E.B. DuBois once said that the chief challenge of the twentieth century would be "the color line." The color line has continued to pose a challenge in the twenty-first century. One of the main problems is that the line doesn't really exist. Race doesn't exist. Racism exists, of course, but race itself is a social fiction. Cultures exist -- blacks created the blues, jazz, rock 'n' roll, and hip-hop. A complete list of black cultural accomplishments could fill not only this book, but several volumes and several libraries besides. But race as a scientific measure is really just a fiction.
In his book The Emperor's New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium, Joseph L. Graves Jr., a professor of evolutionary biology at Arizona State University, argues that race, as a scientific concept, is a fraud. "The term 'race' implies the existence of some nontrivial underlying hereditary features shared by a group of people and not present in other groups," he writes. "None of the physical features by which we have historically defined human races -- skin color, hair type, body stature, blood groups, disease prevalence -- unambiguously corresponds to the racial groups that we have constructed." In other words, all the shorthand things we use to define the races are bunk -- some Italians have dark skin that looks "African," some Hispanics have eyes that look "Asian," some Blacks have straight hair that looks "white." Although Graves debunks race as a valid scientific construct, he is quick to point out that prejudice is nonetheless a major problem in American life: "Clearly, recognizing that no biological races exist in our species cannot be confused with claiming that socially defined racism has not existed and is not still a problem."
Halle, as a child, felt the sting of prejudice. "I got the name-calling, Oreo, that kind of thing," she told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1994. "I had a rough childhood." At one point, she even wondered whether she was adopted. She thought that because "when enough little kids tell you that you can't possibly be your mother's because she's white...what they say means a lot." Still, she couldn't quite understand why she was teased and taunted so much. Again she felt that enormous need. "I had this real need to be accepted and loved by people," Halle told the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1999. "The need for love and acceptance drove me into performing."
It also drove her, temporarily, into politics. While in high school, Halle decided to put her popularity to the test. "I was the head cheerleader and president of the class," she said in 2001. "I ran for prom queen and won, but they accused me of stuffing the ballot box. They said we had to flip a coin to determine who the prom queen really was. I picked heads and won again. But that experience stuck with me. I could be president and head cheerleader, but they were white and I was black and I was different. I realized that I always have to keep fighting....They probably hate me now." "I felt like I was accepted there until it came to being prom queen," Halle said in 1996. "It took me a long time to get over it."
In July 2002 I talked to Terrie Fitzwater, one of Halle's former high school classmates. Fitzwater used to work with Halle in the attendance office, which was in the vice principal's office (it was a way of getting out of study hall). It was sometimes boring work -- the two of them would sit there, talking about "girl stuff" and waiting for the period to end. Occasionally, they'd actually have to perform their main duty -- if a student got in trouble, Terrie or Halle would have to go get them out of class and bring them to the vice principal's office.
Fitzwater recalls that on the day the prom queen vote became known, Halle and another girl were the ones called down to the vice principal's office. The two girls were informed of the tie, but took the news in quite different ways. "Halle was all excited about being prom queen and thought that it would be really cool if there were co-queens," Fitzwater told me. The other girl, however, took another stance -- and the atmosphere became charged. "[She] didn't want any part of that, she didn't want to share the title. So that's when they tossed the coin." Fitzwater says the allegations of ballot stuffing were all bogus: "You couldn't really do that because when you went up to vote they had your number and crossed it off after you voted." Bedford High in 1988 was not Florida in 2000.
Halle got some measure of revenge on the night of the prom. She decided she wasn't going to show up. Why should she? How much fun could she really have with people she knew were out to get her, with people who had bared their fangs the first chance they got, with people who didn't value her and didn't trust her? Halle's mother, always the cool head, told her to go. After all, by staying home, she was letting her enemies win. So Halle headed out -- fashionably late, haute couture late, half an hour before the prom dinner was set to end anyway. There, at the door of the hall, she saw the entire prom committee standing outside, distraught, wondering what had happened to their queen. Halle smiled -- her revenge complete -- but she was miserable inside.
Still, it was a controversy that haunted Halle, and her classmates, for years afterward. Halle's Bedford High class was made up of some 450 people, and so there were a lot of folks involved. The controversy was messy and racial, pitting a black girl against a white one, and the whole thing left a lot of kids and parents feeling disturbed. The furor forced many whites in the area to confront issues of race for the first time; Halle, for her part, was still trying to find herself amid all the ugliness around her. Halle said in 2001: "Not everybody would agree that I was smart or funny or had a solid character. 'Pretty' was said about me more than anything else. I got to the point where I loathed hearing it. I loathed being judged by my physical self. Because I knew that was the tiniest part of me. I couldn't take credit for it. I wasn't proud of it. Everyone comes in the package that they come in. I tried really hard to fit in. So I was in every club, the president of my class, in the Honor Society....I never felt equal. I thought if I made the Honor Society they would know I was as smart as they were; if I ran the paper I'd control what's in the paper and make it diverse; if I'm a cheerleader I'm going to be the captain." Despite Halle's memories of alienation, one of her high school classmates, Kelli Hichens, told me "Halle Berry was a very well-liked girl in school. She had friends who were both black and white, and I know many boys would have liked to have dated her regardless of color. It bothers me and my friends that she is now saying that she was racially discriminated against during high school."
Halle learned a hard lesson from the prom queen episode. She told the New York Times in 1995: "I had worked hard to be accepted, but when it came to being a standard of beauty for the school, they didn't want me. That taught me. No more dancing bear." Belonging to groups hadn't helped Halle feel like she belonged. Even though she was on the cheerleading squad, one of her classmates told me that the other cheerleaders would always give Halle "a hard time." Was it racial? Nobody can recall exactly what the hazing was about. But being teased by cheerleaders -- whatever the reason -- isn't a recipe for a happy childhood.
Halle was also dealing with physical changes at the time. "I developed very early," she told the Daily News in 1998. "I had boobs when nobody else had them and, believe me, it was not a cool thing to be in the sixth grade being a 34C. I kept telling my mom I wanted to get them taken off. She was saying, 'Hold on honey, one day you'll be sooooo happy.'" Halle has also said in interviews that she struggled with obesity during her late high school years (former classmates, however, say she looked just as pretty as she does now -- except for the fact that her hair wasn't as well styled).
While in high school, Halle was not the theatrical type. She never appeared in any Bedford High plays or musicals, but for her senior project she played Tillie, a character from the drama The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. "She went into this other world," Halle's high school drama teacher, Mary Ann Costa, told the Washington Post in 1999. "When you have the ability to create a character that well, you have to tap into something, somehow. Who knows where that came from."
After high school, Halle took a few courses at Cuyahoga Community College. It's a college that draws mostly from the Cleveland community for its student body. Her focus was on the media, but she didn't stick with it long. "I did an internship at a TV station one summer, and they'd send me out on stories, but I couldn't ask people questions," she was quoted as saying in 2000. "I felt it was too intrusive, so I decided journalism wasn't for me."
"I wanted to be a journalist, but I couldn't do it. One of my first assignments, my professor gave me a list of questions that I had to ask an inner-city family whose house had been burned down. I accompanied the lead journalist and had these questions, but I was just bawling. I so lost my composure that it upset the family. I didn't have the skin for the job."
Not long afterward, a boyfriend enrolled her in a beauty contest. Said Halle in 2000: "Beauty can be used as a tool to draw people in. But once you're in, you've got to be able to do something. If you can't, then you're just another pretty face." A new life was just about to open up for Halle.
Copyright © 2002 by Christopher John Farleyset the family. I didn't have the skin for the job."
Not long afterward, a boyfriend enrolled her in a beauty contest. Said Halle in 2000: "Beauty can be used as a tool to draw people in. But once you're in, you've got to be able to do something. If you can't, then you're just another pretty face." A new life was just about to open up for Halle.
Copyright © 2002 by Christopher John Farley
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
SAME OLD SAME OLD
By COOL JEWEL
THIS IS ANOTHER EMPTY ATTEMPT AT A BIOGRAPHY. THE BOOK IS LOADED WITH MANY GENERAL FACTS BUT NOT MUCH DETAIL ABOUT HALLE. IT DOES CONTAIN SOME GOOD STORIES AND FACTS BUT OVERALL JUST READ A MAGAZINE OR A GOSSIP TABLIOD AND YOU WILL FIND THE SAME INFO. IT HAS SOME NICE PHOTOS OF HALLE THRU THE YEARS AND IS NOT A BAD READ BUT NOT A GOOD ONE EITHER.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
A story well told, a book worth reading
By Ariel
Before reading Introducing Halle Berry all I really knew about her was that she won the Oscar for Best Actress in 2002 and that she is one of the most beautiful actress in Hollywood right now. The book tells her story, from struggling with diabetes to begging Spike Lee for a part as a crackhead in one of his films. Christopher Farley touches upon very interesting topics, not only about Halle, but he also looks at the bigger picture. He touches on black actors in Hollywood, or lack thereof. I am a huge Spike Lee fan and there were very interesting tidbits about Spike which I never knew and I was mezmorized reading about. The book also gives a true account of Hollywood and how Halle Berry really paved her own way. Just because she is so stunning it seems as though she had it easy, but that is simply not true. She is a wonderful person and I really enjoyed reading about her life. The book is a fast read and I feel more knowledgable about Hollywood, Halle, and the history of Hollywood after reading this book. I recommend this book to everyone.
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